


Studio

by apparitionism



Series: Studio [1]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hollywood, Bering and Wells AU Week, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:12:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 43,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myka Bering steps off the train in Los Angeles at ten o’clock in the morning on January 15, 1934. She is twenty-three years old. She is Miss Mountain-Fresh Complexion Colorado Springs, 1933, and she knows that at last her life has begun to change. She has signed a two-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She is going to be in the movies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Myka Bering steps off the train in Los Angeles at ten o’clock in the morning on January 15, 1934. She is twenty-three years old. She is Miss Mountain-Fresh Complexion Colorado Springs, 1933, and she knows that at last her life has begun to change. She has signed a two-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She is going to be in the movies.

A room in a Culver City boarding house awaits her and her travel case, which is full of clothing that she now realizes is far better suited to arid Colorado chill than to California’s sun and warmth. She reasons that that is all right; how much time will she be spending in her old skin anyway? The studio will remake her; the studio will clothe the new version of Myka Bering.

Years later, she will see the memo regarding one “Mika Bearing, Colorado beauty contest winner”: “Decent face, far too tall. Not ingénue material. Back line of chorus. Possible comedy support at most.” But handwritten, below: “think she has something; worth signing.”

Her first day at the studio is a blur. She sees so many girls, boys, young people just like her, yet they all know where they are going, what they are doing: “Wardrobe!” “Makeup!” “Publicity!” “Casting!” Myka is sent from one department to another, with each part of her—hair, face, body—examined critically, clinically.

In the afternoon, she is given leave to find something to eat. She wanders among the buildings of Lot 1, hoping the commissary will magically present itself. There are people everywhere: workers in overalls, creative types with loosened ties and rolled-up sleeves, polished executives, chic ladies. She could simply ask someone to point her in the right direction. She could… but what if she picks the wrong person? What if she bothers someone important?

She has spotted no real stars yet; she imagines that they hold themselves above these lowly beings who merely facilitate their shining over Hollywood, over everyone. So she is taken aback when she rounds a corner and sees—leaning against a concrete wall, smoking a cigarette, looking for all the world like a normal, albeit strikingly beautiful, person—THE Helena Wells. She is wearing trousers, Myka registers. She is wearing trousers, she is smoking a cigarette, and she is squinting into the afternoon sun. She looks down and away, drops her cigarette, grinds it under a high heel. Under heel, as a man would. She looks up again, this time straight at Myka. She raises an eyebrow. She smiles, just a little. Then she turns and strides away.

Myka does not yet understand, in this moment, that _this_ is the point at which her life truly began to change.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One PSA before we continue: this will include smoking, drinking, drugging, and possibly other inadvisable behavior. Though I am presenting some of it in rather, um, COMPELLING contexts (cf. the end of this part), I am not advocating any of it. (Although I do drink, so I guess it would be hypocritical not to endorse that to some degree, but the other stuff is just not my bag.)

“So, Meeka,” says the young publicist.

“It’s Myka,” she corrects him.

“Sorry. You know, audiences get confused when they can’t pronounce names—we should think about changing it.” Myka is aghast at the idea; her horror must show in her face, for he smiles at her, rather sweetly. He’s _very_ young, this Steve Jinks. He’s probably younger than she is. He says, “Nobody really wants a new name, but they get used to it. Though the old-timers tell me that Joan Crawford still hates hers—and hates the guy who gave it to her. So if we have to change yours, please don’t hate me.”

“I just saw Helena Wells,” Myka blurts out, because she _has_ to tell someone.

“Yeah?” Steve says. “I met her for the first time last week. She was nice. Odd, but nice.”

“Odd,” Myka tries the word. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly apply.

“More like eccentric, I guess. She hates this whole department. Won’t do a thing anybody tells her.” He makes a little clucking sound. “They wanted to give her a new name, too.”

“What was it?” Myka asks. She cannot imagine a name better than “Helena Wells.”

“Well, _she_ wanted to be billed as H.G. Wells. H.G., that’s what she tells everybody to call her. But Mr. Mayer nixed that. Then what he wanted to name her was Emily Lake. She told him to go jump in it.”

Myka laughs, then says, “I don’t believe you.”

Steve shrugs. “That’s what they tell me.” He perks up. “Hey, do you want that one? I don’t think they’ve used it yet, and it’s kind of pretty.”

“Couldn’t I just keep mine?”

“Well… normally I’d say sure, for a little while, because you probably won’t be billed at first, but they want you to go out with Pete.”

This makes no sense to Myka. “What?” She understands so little; she worries that Steve will think she is simple.

“Pete,” he says again. “You know, Peter Lattimer? The lead in those gangster pictures from a few years ago? They’re bringing him over here for the new B-movie unit.” He slaps himself on the forehead. “I keep forgetting, we’re not supposed to call them B movies here. Because we’re classy. Don’t tell my boss, okay?”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“He’s tall, and you’re _really_ tall for a lady, so you’ll look good in photos with him. It’d get your name out there, first thing. We’d say you’re ‘starlet Emily Lake.’ Or ‘new Hollywood beauty Emily Lake.’ Or, I guess, Myka Bering, if we have to. Anyway, somebody upstairs wants to put you forward. They like what they see in you.”

“Who? What?”

Steve shrugs. “I sure don’t know.” He slaps himself on the forehead again. “Oh, that sounded just awful. What I meant was, I don’t know who. I’m sure that _what_ they see is that you’re great, with lots of potential. I can see that.” He sighs. “But you _are_ really tall.”

The final decision is that Myka can keep her name. And she accepts her first assignment as an M-G-M employee: to dine with Peter Lattimer the following evening.

She meets Peter Lattimer in a car, at the studio. They are to be driven to the Brown Derby for dinner.

She says “Hello, Mr. Lattimer.”

Beyond that, Myka has no idea how to talk to someone who has been in movies, so she leaves it to him to say something. He starts with, “Hey, call me Pete.”

“Pete,” Myka says. “Okay. Call me Myka.”

“Hi, Myka. Say, you look nervous. Don’t be. I know this is your first go-round, but it isn’t bad. Really. And you don’t need to worry about me. We’ll just be pals, okay?”

“Okay,” she agrees, but she doesn’t know why he would say such a thing.

At the Brown Derby— _I am at the Brown Derby!_ Myka thinks—drinks are served; Myka has Champagne for the first time in her life. She and Pete lean toward each other and smile for cameras.

He tells her, over steaks, why they will just be pals: he is involved with a woman, a married woman, whom he identifies only as “Amanda.”

“Does Steve know?” Myka asks.

“Everybody knows. Everybody here, that is. Not out there. That’s why you and me, we’re helping each other out.”

And over the next few weeks, Myka has screen tests, dance practice, acting lessons by day; by night, she and Pete help each other out. They go to the Derby, the Biltmore Bowl, the Clover Club.

The March, 1934 issue of _Photoplay_ magazine includes a photo of the two toasting each other. The caption reads, “Peter Lattimer, soon to ply his tough-guy trade in ‘Crime Scene,’ enjoys a pleasant cocktail with his new frequent companion, M-G-M’s fresh face Myka Bering.”

Now that Prohibition has been repealed, everyone toasts everyone else over everything; Hollywood swims and soaks in alcohol. So Myka is surprised that Pete drinks lemonade, root beer, grape juice. “I got into some trouble a while back,” he tells her. “And Amanda says she won’t see me anymore if I do it again. So I won’t.”

Myka wonders if this is why Amanda is married to someone else.

Every surface here hides secrets.

****

Steve becomes her guide. He has been at the studio for only a little longer than she has, but he knows everything. Myka doesn’t ask how.

One morning, Myka sees a stately black woman, wearing enormous glasses and an incongruous pink skirt suit, striding through the lot. The streams of people part before her, making way, almost bowing as she passes, as if she is royalty. “Who’s that?” Myka asks Steve.

“That’s Mrs. Frederic. She’s Mr. Mayer’s secretary. If she likes you, you’ve got it made.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

****

One night when Myka and Pete are at dinner, Louis B. Mayer himself stops at their table. They both stand up, shocked. “Sit down _now_ ,” Pete mutters to Myka as he steps forward to shake the studio head’s hand. He’s right, she realizes; she would _tower over_ Mr. Mayer.

The next day, Myka and Steve are about to seat themselves with boxed lunches at a picnic table outside the commissary when Pete shouts at her, from across the street, “That’s right, sit down, you giraffe!” He grins and gives her a thumbs-up.

Steve looks thoughtfully at Myka. “You know, I bet I can work with that,” he says.

****

In April, 1934, _Photoplay_ magazine publishes a full-page portrait of Myka. The caption: “Who’s this lofty beauty? Why, it’s none other than Myka Bering, to be seen in upcoming M-G-M features. They call her ‘giraffe’ around the studio, but we’ll just call her ‘gorgeous.’”

****

Weeks later, Myka has at last been deemed ready for… something. Her dancing is terrible, so she is cast in a historical drama as a maid. She has seven lines, each of which seems little more than some variation on “yes, my lady.”

As far as Myka is concerned, however, there is a significant fact about the movie that goes far beyond her own casting: Helena Wells is its star. She is playing a queen.

Myka has not seen Helena since that first day on the lot. She has kept her ears open, though; she has heard rumors, whispers, and, louder, both jeers and praise. There are murmurs of terrible things that happened to her family in the Great War, and questions about why she left England for Hollywood. It was clearly not out of any hunger for stardom, for she is known to be almost indifferent to that status. The word “odd” does come up, as does Steve’s more gentle “eccentric.” Everyone recognizes that Helena—H.G., they all call her—does things in her own time, in her own way. She has freedom because of her power at the box-office and because, Myka learns from Steve, she falls under the protection of Mrs. Frederic. “Don’t know why,” Steve says, “but Mrs. Frederic always goes to the mat for H.G.”

None of this has had any effect, apparently, on Artie Nielsen, the director of the new picture. Mr. Nielsen hates Helena. Helena despises Mr. Nielsen. They loathe working together, but every picture on which they collaborate is a smash, so: “Queen of the Realm” is next.

On set, at first, Myka stays in the background as much as possible. She has no choice, really; scenes are blocked and she is nothing but an object, no more than a piece of furniture to be angled and lit in a certain way. As the process continues, day after day, she begins to understand something about the incessant focus on the exterior, the way in which what it conceals is deemed unimportant—or at least, unnecessary to reveal. On the screen, she is—that is, she will be—a photograph, or the succession of photographs that make up the film. To those who read the fan magazines, she _is_ that woman having a cocktail with Peter Lattimer. Who is, according to the photo, having a cocktail too.

Myka continues to go to dinners, to parties, to premieres. All with Pete. One day, after a particularly late night out, she cannot keep herself from yawning between takes. Helena asks her, archly, “Am I boring you, Miss Bering?”

“Sorry,” Myka says. They have developed a rapport that is not a friendship, exactly, but Myka is almost always in the background of Helena’s scenes, and Helena clearly expects those around her to keep her entertained. She is exceptionally quick. Myka has to stay on her toes. “Sometimes I think they plan it this way: always sending me out on the night before my earliest call time yet.”

“Ah yes,” Helena says. “You and Mr. Lattimer. You photograph nicely together.”

“Thanks,” Myka says. “You don’t ever have to do any of that, I guess.”

Helena sniffs. “I don’t generally go to parties, if that’s what you mean.”

“You’re lucky,” Myka says, and yawns again, right as Mr. Nielsen yells “Action!”

During the next break, through which they must hold their places, Helena picks up their conversation. “Not so lucky as all that,” she says. She complains that she hates this role. How ridiculous to play a queen, she opines, and that much more ridiculous to spend an hour climbing into this bejeweled costume each and every day. But Myka makes Helena laugh when she says, “At least you beat Garbo to it.” For while Garbo is to play the lead in “Queen Christina,” Helena’s picture will bow first.

The fan magazines portray the two of them, Wells and Garbo, as engaged in a rivalry of sorts, yet as far as Myka has seen, they are reasonably friendly. But then again, she is learning that seeing is never believing. So she draws no conclusions.

****

Halfway through the filming of “Queen of the Realm,” Myka is invited to a late Friday-night party at Mr. Nielsen’s house. She brings Pete along so that they can be caught by photographers on their way in. He’s exhausted—he shot three chase scenes today—so she leaves him dozing in a chair by the pool and sets out in search of his root beer.

She is turning away from the bar, glass in hand, when she is brought up short.

Helena is standing behind her. It has been ages since Myka has seen her in anything but her queenly regalia, and she struggles to readjust to the Helena she remembers from that first day: trousered, normal-but-beautiful. She even has a cigarette in hand.

“I thought you didn’t go to parties,” is all Myka can think to say.

Helena smiles slyly. “As you know, Artie cannot stand me. Thus I present myself at his party. He can hardly turn me away, and I have ruined his evening.”

“But,” Myka says, “if you hate parties so much, he’s pretty much ruined yours too, right?”

“Myka,” Helena says, “please refrain from insulting yourself. How could I hate this party if it allows me to spend time with you?” Somewhere in the back of her mind, Myka is certain she hears alarm bells. She ignores them, for she is otherwise occupied: noticing the way Helena holds her cigarette—between thumb and forefinger, as Pete does in his gangster persona—watching her raise it to her mouth, take a terse drag, then exhale. “What are you drinking?” Helena asks, her voice rough from the smoke.

“It’s a root beer,” Myka says. Helena makes a face. “For Pete,” Myka clarifies, though she does not know why she feels she must.

“Then you still need a real drink,” Helena says. “And may I join you?”

****

The “real drink” Helena decides Myka needs is whiskey. Scotch whisky, to be precise, which Myka has never had before, and she has certainly never heard of the kind Helena thinks they should drink; Myka knows she could never spell the mash of sound that Helena tells the bartender to pour into two glasses. “No, neat,” Helena says as he reaches for the soda water. Helena gallantly carries Myka’s drink and her own, her cigarette hanging precariously between her lips, as Myka leads her to the backyard.

“Hey, H.G., good to see you again,” Pete says as they draw near. “You probably don’t remember, but we met a couple years ago.”

“I remember quite well,” Helena says. “You made a rather crude request, to which I responded in the negative.”

Pete winces. “It was kind of a bad time for me.”

“Not to worry,” Helena assures him. “I have no room to criticize anyone’s behavior.”

Pete nods. “We’re aces then?”

“We are.”

Myka is desperately curious, but she holds her tongue. Helena hands her her drink, clinking her glass against Myka’s. “To the picture,” she says. “And to you.”

Myka glances at Pete. He’s sitting back, sipping his root beer, watching them. Abruptly, he stands. “I’m gonna go home,” he announces. “Long day. Mykes, you all right to get a cab or something?”

This is new.

Helena says, “I have my car and driver. I’ll see that she gets home.”

Pete says, “Yeah, okay. Just don’t—”

“I think you should stop there,” Helena interrupts.

“Yeah, okay,” Pete says again. He leans over and kisses Myka on the cheek. “Have a good night, Mykes. Don’t do anything you don’t want to.”

And Myka feels a frisson of what she somehow knows should be apprehension, but instead is purely anticipation. She sips at the scotch, expecting it to burn, expecting to cough and thus lay her naïveté completely bare. Instead of burning her, it warms her. Instead of coughing, she breathes easily, out, then in. She catches a bit of smoke from Helena’s cigarette.

****

Less than an hour later, they are in the back of Helena’s Pierce-Arrow limousine. It is the largest, most remarkable car Myka has ever seen, much less been seated in, much less been _helped into_ by a uniformed driver.

She feels that tonight, everyone is speaking, even _moving_ , in languages foreign to her. She feels it even more when Helena takes a packet from her trouser pocket and inhales a pinch of powder from it.

“What’s that?” Myka asks.

“Cocaine,” Helena says.

Myka knows she should be horrified. She should say “stop this car.” She should get out of the car, and she should run far away from Helena Wells and this entire appalling town. She should go home to her parents, her sister, all the people in Colorado Springs who know her as a smart girl, a pretty girl, a good girl, a girl who reads books on Friday night.

They do not know her as a girl who rides in the back of a limousine with a movie star who takes drugs, a movie star whose pupils are dilating, whose breath is coming faster, whose hand is hot on Myka’s stockinged thigh.

“What are you doing?” Myka should demand, and “Stop!” she should insist.

But she knows exactly what Helena is doing, and she knows that she will die if Helena stops. She has had only one drink and did not touch the cocaine, but she is under the influence all the same: her blood is _screaming_ ; her body is alive exactly where Helena’s hand is resting, and when Helena leans closer, when her hand begins to move up Myka’s leg, Myka discovers something fundamental about herself. She had not known that she could _want_ so strongly; she had not known that she could be so bold and _take_ what she wants. But she can. She does.

TBC

[Historical note: Louis B. Mayer’s real secretary, Ida Koverman, had power like whoa.]

[Extra PSA: Don’t do coke. Seriously, don’t.]


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I originally wrote this piece, I lost my mind and got the release date of Garbo's Queen Christina wrong. I was and am mortified by the mistake, but I can't go back and change it without making a total hash of ages and dates and timelines. So I have to beg you, for the purposes of this story, to pretend it came out a year later than it actually did.

“This isn’t my boarding house,” Myka says as the car comes to a stop. “This isn’t even Culver City.” She knows she is speaking disingenuously, after what she and Helena have just done, but she is certain she cannot bring herself to say anything about _that_.

“No,” Helena says, still somewhat breathless.

 _I did that_ , Myka thinks. But what she says is, “Then where are we?”

“The Hills. And this is my home.” Helena’s hands shake a little as she begins to button her shirt.

 _I did that too_. Yet, strangely, the back of a limousine is one thing. Being taken to someone’s house is… it feels more crude, somehow. “You… you told Pete you’d see that I got home.”

“Yes,” Helena says. “But I didn’t tell him when.”

“I don’t know…” Myka begins, but she stops, because now she is not sure, not sure at all, of what she does or doesn’t know.

The problem is not Myka’s sense of propriety, really, though that is certainly part of her reluctance. The larger part… this feels like a bright, blinding line. She wants to cross it: she finds it so easy to slide into imagining what they will do, once they are inside that house. But, too, she does not want to cross it: she can also imagine trying to speak to her parents on the telephone, trying to write them letters, trying to pretend that she is the same person who left them, and not someone who has left them behind.

What just happened, something so fast and magic: that can be excused. It was a lapse, a dazzling anomaly. But now Myka is thinking, is _considering_.

Helena moves closer to her. “I will send you back to your boarding house if that is what you want.” Those are her words. But her voice still sounds of whisky and smoke and “touch me” and “please” and Myka does not understand how Helena can be so self-assured and yet so supplicant. “Practice,” says a whisper of doubt.

 _Magic_ , she feels herself whisper back.

Helena has closed part of the distance between them; Myka closes the rest. She turns to face Helena, then in a slow, deliberate motion, straddles her lap. 

Helena does not move.

The face of Helena Wells fills Myka’s vision, looking for all the world like a close-up on a movie screen. Myka knows this face so well, although strangely, before, Helena was not one of the stars Myka truly idolized. She thought Helena beautiful and talented of course, but when Myka’s friends would gush over her, Myka’s response was always, “I can’t quite _see_ it.”

She leans down now and slowly, carefully, undoes Helena’s topmost shirt button, the one Helena fastened last. “I don’t want to go back to the boarding house,” she says. “Take me inside.”

Helena opens her mouth and exhales. Myka realizes: she has been holding her breath.

****

On Monday morning, Myka is beside herself with nerves. She tries to wave to Hank, the guard at the gate, as has become her custom, but some part of her is certain that he can read on her face, blinking and buzzing like a neon sign, “I spent two nights with Helena Wells.”

Because she did spend two nights with Helena Wells. Two nights, and the better part of two days; Helena had kissed her into the limousine and sent her back to Culver City just yesterday evening.

At home in Colorado Springs, Myka dated Sam Martino, a police officer. Sam was seeing one girl already when he asked Myka out, and Myka didn’t mind that: it meant she wasn’t burdened with a boyfriend who would be hanging around all the time. They went out to the movies, to dinner, to a dance. Her father had asked what “that Sam’s” intentions were, and Myka had said, honestly, that she had no idea. She’d tried, then, to envision what it would be like to spend days, to spend nights with him—with anyone. She couldn’t. Or maybe it was that she did not find the idea appealing enough to pursue it with sufficient enthusiasm.

Now she knows what it is like. And the appeal of the idea has, to put it mildly, grown.

In her own house, Helena smokes less, drinks less, mostly puts the cocaine away. She slows down. Her smiles are less knowing. She laughs more openly. The Helenas of the previous Friday—the queen at the studio, followed by the charmer at the party, followed then by the seductress in the limousine—feel like distant memories to Myka. The Helena she wants most is the one who, when they awoke on Saturday morning (very nearly afternoon), asked Myka, “Can you cook?”

“Not really,” Myka said.

“That is a shame,” Helena told her. “Because my housekeeper has the weekend off. I suppose we’ll starve, unless I make some desperate attempt to feed us.” She sighed heavily.

After which, she went to the kitchen and prepared the best omelette Myka had ever tasted. “You’re a fraud,” Myka told her.

“Yes,” Helena said, quite seriously, and Myka made a mental note to come back to that at some point, but promptly filed that note away, because Helena also said, quite seriously, “You look beautiful wearing my robe.”

All weekend long, she felt that she had never been so comfortable around another person. Now she has never been so jumpy. Even on her first day at the studio, months ago, she was not anxious like this.

Because what will Helena do?

****

What Helena will do: she will sweep in like the queen she is. She will take her mark at the center of the scene.

Mr. Nielsen will shout, “Action!”

A point in the scene will arrive at which the queen sweeps around, turning her back briefly to the camera. At that point, she will wink at the very tall maid standing behind her.

The very tall maid standing behind her will let out an involuntary yelp, spoiling the take.

Mr. Nielsen will yell, “Cut!”

The queen will laugh, Mr. Nielsen will turn red with fury, and the very tall maid will want to disappear. She will also want, quite desperately, for the queen to grab her and kiss her senseless.

****

By the end of the day, Myka realizes that she just has to _tell_ someone. She _has_ to. She’s seen Steve, the way he talks to some of the men at the studio—set decorators from the property department, hairdressers, even the famous Mr. Adrian, who designs the beautiful gowns for Garbo and Helena (and maybe someday for Myka). Surely Steve, of all people, will understand. Someone has to. She can’t keep this inside. (She knows Pete already knows. Obviously. She knows he knows, but she can’t _tell_ him. He has too many secrets of his own to keep.)

“You can’t be seen with her. Ever,” Steve says immediately, once she has told him.

“Why not?”

“Because of what your face looked like when you said her name just now.”

And Myka understands: she has not yet grown a shell.

“Also, you have to start calling her H.G. People will think you’re special if you call her Helena all the time.”

“But what if she _is_ special?” Helena says, pushing through the door into the office, surprising them both. She is out of costume and she is holding her cigarette, but her hair is still queenly. It is an incongruous look.

“Oh my god, H.G.!” Steve exclaims. “What are you doing here? My office is a mess!”

“Calm down, Mr. Jinks,” Helena says, and then, to Myka, “I was just coming to chat with our young friend here about what we might do. I know he handles you.”

“Who handles _you_?” Myka asks.

She should have known what Helena’s answer would be: “No one handles me.” Helena grins wickedly. “Except, perhaps, you.”

Steve touches his forehead. “Why me?” he beseeches them both. “I’m _new at this_.”

“And yet,” Helena says, “I understand that you have… relevant experience.” At this, Steve turns bright red, and Helena laughs. “Just a bit of fun at your expense,” she says. “But do be honest, darling: if you believe you will need help with any campaign you undertake, let us find that help at once.”

Steve sits up. “I can do it,” he says. “I was thinking, as Myka was talking, that it would be pretty easy to do what they did with you and Garbo.”

Now it’s Myka’s turn to touch her forehead. “You and _Garbo_?” she says, her voice rising. The “o” in “Garbo” is almost a squeak.

“Oh brother,” Steve says.

Helena waves her hand. “It was a long time ago; quite brief as well. We make far better friends than anything else.”

“But so, anyhow,” Steve says hurriedly, “what the publicity boys did—what they, or I guess I mean we, like to do a lot—is make like certain people are rivals. Fans love a good fight, and if they’re focusing on the fight, well…”

Helena finishes for him, “They fail to recognize the possibility of any other sort of relationship.”

“Then why,” Myka says, and she has no idea how to feel about any of this, for the ground is shifting beneath her feet by the second, “do they _still_ say you and she fight? If there _isn’t_ any other sort of relationship?”

“Inertia?” Helena offers. “Mr. Jinks, your department does like to cling to a storyline once they have set one in motion.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that,” Steve says. “But in the meantime, I’ll get started on showing how poorly the two of you get along.”

Myka can’t keep from continuing to eye Helena with bewilderment. Garbo? Helena and _Garbo_? Which means… which means that Myka is, in all things, being compared to _Garbo_?

“And,” Steve says, looking from Myka to Helena and back again, “at this point, maybe that’s true.”

“Myka,” Helena says, and her face relaxes, just for a moment, into that of the quiet, weekend Helena.

And Myka can’t resist. She just can’t. If she has to compete with Garbo, then so be it, she will _compete with Garbo_. “Helena,” she says back, and shakes her head.

“Okay,” Steve sighs. “Thought for a minute there I might have got off easy. But listen: nothing outside the studio! Please!”

“Can I at least go to her house?” Myka asks. She feels like she did when she would ask her father for something she knew he would be loath to bestow, as when she had wanted time off from the bookstore to compete in the beauty contest.

Steve looks at Helena. Helena says, “My house _is_ quite private.”

Steve sighs again. “Just… not all the time, all right? Not even often.” Myka’s face falls, and he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But H.G., explain it to her, _you_ know things now aren’t like they were even a couple of years ago, and even here at the studio. I’m so sorry. I would change it if I could.”

Without a trace of mockery or archness, Helena says to Steve, “I know, darling. I know.”

****

In June, 1934, _Photoplay_ prints a photograph “Straight from the set of M-G-M’s ‘Queen of the Realm’: Watch out, Queen Helena! Looks like someone’s trying to steal your crown! (And for once, it isn’t Garbo!)” The photo shows Myka looming, as she cannot help but do, behind Helena; her hands are raised, and she might indeed be about to remove the crown from Helena’s head.

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

Early on, in despite of Steve and his warnings, they spend many nights together. They practice subterfuge: Pete and Myka go out for dinner or dancing, per usual, and then the car drops Myka at Helena’s secluded house.

Everyone trusts drivers not to talk. For some reason, everyone simply does.

Myka thinks it may be because it is impossible for anyone, even stars, to be on alert all the time.

She herself learns this lesson when, one day after a particularly long and gloriously sleepless night, she yawns in the background of a scene, between takes.

“Am I _boring_ you, Miss Bering?” Helena asks. The same words she used, so many weeks ago, and the tone is still knowing, but now it is also intimate. It is a lover’s tease.

Myka responds, “I’ll give you my answer tomorrow night.” They have already arranged their next rendezvous.

But Mr. Nielsen hears Myka’s words.

Everything screeches to a halt. Mr. Nielsen drags Helena to the side, beside a bank of lights, and says, far more loudly than he should, “You swore you were finished with all this. You swore it to me, and now you are undermining this picture!”

“How in the world am I undermining this picture?” Helena demands. “What effect could this possibly be having on the picture?”

“In the first place,” Mr. Nielsen says, “this is _my_ picture. _I_ am making this film.”

“Fine. What effect could this possibly be having on _your_ picture?”

“If you are found out—which you will be, given displays like that—the picture will never be finished. Or they’ll make me reshoot it with someone else. And all this work will have been lost!”

“Your work being lost, Artie, does not concern me,” Helena tells him. She is not even deigning to show anger now.

“You swore it to me!”

“Only because you threatened to storm off the lot if I would not!”

“No!” Artie explodes. “It was because you were going to ruin not only your own career, but that of a very talented young woman who I _knew_ would be a star! Who I _knew_ would be just as good in pictures as you!”

Listening to them, Myka is beginning to understand why they hate each other. She discerns that Mr. Nielsen does not really care what Helena does, and he certainly does not care that she does whatever that is with Myka. Mr. Nielsen cares about exactly what he said: the picture. He lives for the picture itself, for how it will look and sound when it is complete. Helena, on the other hand, could not care less about the picture itself, and Artie is clearly driven mad by the idea that she never will. And Helena thinks Artie a fool for the strength of his devotion to what she considers nothing but a silly business.

Myka is not sure what Helena truly does care about. She has moments of intensity, some of them, blessedly, with Myka, but usually? She floats. Her outsize talent for the screen, her foreignness, her quick wit, even her cocaine—all of these things she uses to keep her distance.

Helena says calmly, with that serenity creating a chasm between her and Mr. Nielsen, “This picture is nearing completion.”

“Yes,” Mr. Nielsen has to agree.

“Then could we not concern ourselves with this problem, if it is a problem, next time? If there is a next time?”

“You know perfectly well there’ll be a next time,” Mr. Nielsen mutters. “Until one of these days, when I intentionally make you look bad in a picture, just so they’ll stop this madness between the two of us.”

“You’re the one who wants to make _good_ pictures,” Helena twits him.

“And you’re the one who refuses to accept that that’s important!”

Myka suspects they could go on like this all day.

She has at least gained an answer to one of her questions. But now she adds a new one to her burgeoning list: now she wants to know what happened to the young woman whose career Helena was going to ruin.

****

“Queen of the Realm” is to premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theater on October 14, 1934. The premiere will be followed by a lavish party.

On the night two weeks prior to that date, Helena and Myka are eating a late dinner together in Helena’s kitchen. “I wish my parents could come see the premiere,” Myka says.

“Why can’t they?” Helena asks.

“They could never afford it. And I can’t either.”

Helena looks bewildered. “But I can.”

“I can’t ask you to buy things for my parents! What would they say about it?”

“What would they _say_ about it?” Helena repeats. “A better question is, what would they _know_ about it?”

“I would just pretend that _I_ bought them train tickets, put them up in a hotel?”

“Tell them that the studio is paying,” Helena suggests. “In a sense, that’s quite true. The studio paid _me_ , and I am merely the conduit through which the money passes to you.”

“I don’t know…”

Helena smiles her quietest smile. “This is something you want. Let me give this to you.”

And Myka cannot help but be charmed anew.

****

Myka had thought she was finished with being astonished by Hollywood glamour. She thought she had seen enough of how that glamour was so carefully constructed that she could see through it fairly clearly.

But she had not yet attended the premiere of a Helena Wells movie.

The premieres she has been to with Pete—and there have not been that many, for Pete is, as he is perfectly happy to admit, not that big a star—have been, comparatively, quiet afternoon walks along a red-orange piece of matting.

She had been worried that her parents would not be impressed.

She need not have concerned herself.

They arrive early; Myka does not want to take a chance on anything going wrong. The regular complement of photographers are there; Myka says hello to one or two who have been particularly accommodating in showcasing her and Pete. “Big night for you, right, Miss Bering?” says one.

Myka nods and smiles. She is interested in seeing the final version of the picture, but she has seen some of the footage already. The shock that accompanied that first filmic sight of herself will not be repeated—this is what Helena said, and Pete agreed with her. “It’s weird, but after that first time, it really is just some guy who looks like you. And some people can take it, and some people can’t. You know; you’ve seen how fast that theater empties when the lights go down at a premiere.”

Myka can take it. That tall girl on the screen does look like her, a little, but she knows it’s somebody else.

More photographers arrive. And still more. And still more.

“There are so many!” Myka’s mother exclaims.

“Helena—I mean, H.G.—I mean, Miss Wells—doesn’t go out much. So this is a big opportunity for them.”

Mr. Nielsen arrives. She points him out to her parents.

Mr. Mayer arrives. She ducks her head, tries to appear shorter than she is.

Other names arrive. Myka does not care.

Finally, she sees the Pierce-Arrow. She feels a momentary thrill that it _is_ the Pierce-Arrow, that she knows that car oh so well. She tries not to let any of that show in her face.

“How am I supposed to look like I barely know you?” she’d asked Helena desperately after Steve told her she wasn’t even allowed to say “H.G.” in public until she could school her features.

Helena said, as if it were self-evident, “You must _act_.”

This evening is as important as a screen test.

When Helena steps out of the Pierce-Arrow, Myka’s mother gasps. Her father whistles softly.

Myka closes her eyes and tries not to think of pushing Helena back into the limousine’s rear seat.

****

The cocktail party after the movie is a glistening affair. Myka’s father expresses worry that his brown suit is not fancy enough. Her mother, who is wearing one of her best Sunday dresses, says, “Myka is the movie star, so she’s the one wearing the fancy gown. We aren’t that kind of people.”

“First,” Myka says, “I’m not a movie star. I had seven lines!”

“That’s correct,” her father says. “I counted.”

“You did?” Myka is beyond pleased that he paid such close attention.

“Of course I did! My little girl is in a _movie_!”

Myka has never heard such enthusiasm from her father. The beauty contest had been silly, frivolous, and worst of all, pointless. Because Myka could never win. But when Myka did win, then it was Hollywood that was silly, frivolous, and pointless.

Her mother adds, “Tracy was so disappointed that she had to stay home with your aunt. She already tells all the girls at school that you’re going to be a star—imagine how thrilled she would have been to say she’d been to your movie premiere!”

This is… peculiar. To be the one of interest, the one in the family spotlight…

Myka can feel the spotlight on her dim as her parents’ awareness is drawn elsewhere, so she turns around to see…

Helena.

Helena is coming to meet her parents. And, judging by what looks to be a gleam in her eye, to torture Myka.

“Well,” Helena says, as she sweeps to Myka’s side. “I can certainly see that Myka inherited her star quality.”

“Oh,” Myka’s mother says.

“Ah,” her father says.

“I am so pleased to have her at the studio,” Helena intones.

“Thanks,” Myka says. “That’s nice of you to say.”

Myka’s father blurts, “It’s more than nice!”

“No, no,” Helena says. “It’s quite true, I _am_ so pleased to _have_ her.” Myka is possessed by a sudden desire to slap Helena. “At the studio,” Helena adds.

****

Myka treats her parents to a late dinner, after the party, at the Brown Derby. Their heads swivel as they seek out stars. Myka discreetly points out directors, writers, more photographers.

Myka remembers her first time here, how she learned her first secret. Now, Myka hears the hidden meanings behind so many of the statements she makes, the descriptions she gives.

Her parents ask about Pete: they’ve seen the pictures. “We’re just good friends,” Myka says.

They don’t believe her, though it is the truest thing she will say this evening.

They ask about Helena; they say she is so glamorous, yet she was so kind to them. Is she kind to Myka?

Myka chokes on her Champagne and has a coughing fit.

This pleases her parents, for they take it as evidence that she is unused to drinking alcohol.

Everything about this night is backward.

Down to the fact that when she drops her parents at the hotel, she tells her driver to take her to Helena’s house. They have not arranged anything; Myka simply has to see her.

***

Myka dismisses the driver when they reach the house. If Helena has not yet returned from the party, Myka will wait.

But Helena is home. She answers the bell in the robe Myka wore on her first morning here.

“Myka,” Helena says. She almost pants out the word. Myka sees why: she is high, so high she is barely in the room.

“What are you doing?” Myka asks. “Are you all right?”

“Now I am,” Helena says. She comes to Myka and kisses her. Her lips are unstable; they feel as if they are shuddering against Myka’s.

Myka has never seen her quite like this. Steve has told her that when Helena first arrived in Hollywood, she was far more free with drugs, but that she quieted down quickly. He thinks Garbo had something to do with it, for that was when their affair, ephemeral as it was, took place. He thinks, or he thinks he has heard, that Garbo showed Helena that she did not have to run quite so hard and so fast.

“Away from something?” Myka had asked.

“That, I don’t know,” Steve had said. “I don’t think anybody does. Maybe Mrs. Frederic.”

Myka wishes she knew. If she knew, maybe she could start to understand why Helena has done this tonight.

“Your parents are charming,” Helena says. She is clearly trying very hard to contain herself. The words are her particular drug-fueled combination of clipped and languorous.

“You’re just being kind. Which is what they said you are, by the way.”

Helena laughs, a low chuckle that starts and then threatens not to stop.

“Helena, please. Tell me why you did this.”

“One must do _something_ ,” Helena says as her laugh-spasms fade.

“But why this? You could have gone to dinner.”

“Not with you,” Helena says.

“Oh,” Myka says.

“Yes, oh.” Helena twists her neck. Her hands are busy, running over her arms, pulling at the sleeves of the robe. “The picture is finished, Myka. We will not be cast together again; Artie will see to that. Your parents… I have no doubt that seeing your parents has reminded you of exactly what is right and what is wrong.”

“Helena,” Myka says. She has had occasion, these last months, to question so many supposed givens, so many assumptions. Axioms of morality. What is decent, what is not. What is worth retaining, and what is not. What _else_ is in the world. What new givens she might discover. “Finishing the picture… seeing my parents… yes. They show that things have changed. And they’ll change even more. But then what did I do, Helena? What was the first thing I wanted?”

Helena shakes her head. “I don’t believe you. You came here out of…”

“Out of what? Out of habit? It seems to me you’re the one who went back to some old habits.”

Helena shakes her head again, fast, jerky.

“The first thing I wanted was you,” Myka says. And she does, she still does, even right in this moment. Even like this, when Helena is quivering, wide-eyed, half-crazed…

“I wanted you,” Helena says. “I couldn’t have you.”

Myka doesn’t know how to fix any of this. It is too much for her. So she says the only thing she knows is true: “You can have me now.”

Helena breathes, openmouthed, as if she’s just run up a flight of stairs.

Then, suddenly, she falls to her knees and looks up at Myka. “Yes?” she asks.

“God, yes,” Myka says, and she feels rough, fast hands pushing up the length of her gown. She sees Helena’s robe fall off her shoulders, exposing the lithe muscles of her back. “God,” she says again, as Helena’s reckless mouth meets her body. And she thanks god, fervently, that it is not yet tomorrow.

TBC

[PSA redux: Don’t EVER do coke. This is for real. It is not worth it.]


	5. Chapter 5

Things happen.

This is how Myka has chosen to deal with the night of the premiere: by telling herself that things happen. Helena eventually came down; crashed. She stayed home for two days. Then she returned to work; she is in script conferences now for a new picture, and Myka has not seen her since that night.

Pete takes Myka to dinner regularly—not for photographers; simply to cheer her up. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet my parents,” she told him during their first meal, afterwards. “They would have liked you.”

The reason Pete didn’t meet her parents—the reason he didn’t come to her premiere—is that he and Amanda had gone away together. For four days. He had come back depressed.

At first, Myka thought they must have broken up.

“No,” Pete said. “That’s not it at all. It’s that times like that, I get to see what it would have been like if I hadn’t messed everything up. And I really really like what it would have been like.”

“I understand,” Myka had said.

“I know you do,” Pete told her.

Things happen.

****

Myka and Helena come back together in a surprising way.

Myka is working on a new picture too—she is playing a nurse in a melodrama, and she has enough lines that she does not need to count them. The director is far faster than Mr. Nielsen; this picture does not have the budget that a Nielsen picture does, that a Wells picture does. If Myka were to yelp in the middle of a take here? Well, then, the nurse might very well yelp in the finished film.

But she is learning. She is always learning. She does not know as much as Steve yet, but she is learning to classify, categorize, calculate. Which figures of importance to talk to, and for how long. (She meets Mr. Thalberg, the producer, when he visits the set; she is smart enough to speak to him for less than a minute.) Whom to avoid: for example, anyone who is likely to talk to gossip columnist Louella Parsons. Whom to cultivate: Steve has introduced her to several of the lady film editors, and they are all so smart and capable. They also could give Myka more, or less, time on screen. Their influence is subtle, but it is strong.

Myka knows she could not have done any of this without Steve. Without his guidance, she would have made mistakes even more terrible than those she has actually made. She would have been sent home long ago.

The debt she owes him increases on the day she will remember as “Mrs. Frederic, and then the rest of it.”

She and Steve are eating lunch together, as they do. They are outdoors, for Steve has been bemoaning his pale complexion. “They’re all so tanned,” he complains of the many attractive men at the studio. “They look at me and see a freckled ghost.”

“You do have freckles,” Myka concedes, “but you don’t look like a ghost. And I know for a fact that plenty of men think you’re adorable.” He _is_ adorable. She so wants for him to find someone he loves, someone who loves him—because _he_ wants that. He is a romantic, just as Myka is.

“Don’t say that so loudly,” comes a voice from behind Myka.

Now Steve _does_ look like a ghost. He leaps to his feet, practically knocking over the table, his lunch, Myka’s coffee cup. “Mrs. Frederic!” he cries.

Myka jumps up too, jumps up and turns around. She is mortified. In spite of all Steve’s efforts, she is going to be sent back to Colorado _this very minute_.

“I’m so sorry,” Myka begins to babble, “I wasn’t thinking, and I would never want to hurt Steve, so whatever you’re going to do, please do it to me and not to him, because he’s so smart and good at his job and I—”

“Miss Bering,” says the imposing figure. “If you would be so kind as to stop talking.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Myka says.

“Thank you. First, a word of advice: some topics are best discussed behind closed doors.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Myka repeats.

“Indeed. Second, a question: do you intend to remain at this studio? To make a career of this?”

“Of acting?” Myka is startled. She has not thought of it as a _career_. She has thought of it as… she realizes that she is not at all sure how she has thought of it. It is something that has been happening to her, not something that she has been _doing_. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Well,” Mrs. Frederic says. “At least you’re honest.”

“I think she should,” Steve says. “For a lot of reasons.”

Mrs. Frederic asks, “Is H.G. Wells one of those reasons?” She asks Myka, not Steve.

“Oh brother,” Steve gulps.

“I…” Myka starts, but she does not know how to finish. She wants to scream “yes!” But how can she? First, she does not really know where things stand between her and Helena. But second, how can she possibly speak of such things honestly, out loud, with someone who has so much power?

 “You need to tell her, Myka,” Steve says. “With Mrs. Frederic, it’s important to be honest.”

“All right,” Myka says. “Yes. She’s… a reason. An important reason. But I don’t know right now whether—”

“Not _overly_ honest,” Steve hurries to interrupt.

“Miss Bering. I believe that you have potential. But I also need to make sure you are aware that there is only so much that one person—even such a person as myself—can do. About anything. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Myka says. She hopes she does, anyway.

“Very good. Now. I would like to inform you that you have an appointment in Screening Room 15, in the projection department.”

“I do?”

Mrs. Frederic sighs severely. To Steve, she says, “Is she always this slow?”

And Steve smiles. “Not always. In her defense, she’s been feeling kind of lonely lately.”

****

Myka peeks into, then enters, the dim screening room. She steps softly, not wanting to disturb its soft silence.

Helena is standing in front of the screen, facing its blank expanse. “This is the room,” she says conversationally, “in which my first picture was shown for the first time.” She turns around. “I suspect Mrs. Frederic chose this space on purpose. To remind me of the distance between that time and this.”

Myka does not know how to respond.

“I’m sorry,” Helena says. “I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better than that—a better person than I, surely, but if… well, in any case, a better version of _this_ person than the one I showed you.”

“You were hurt,” Myka says.

“But not by you. You have been nothing but good to me. Nothing but far too good, and I have not repaid you in kind. Artie was not wrong. I do… undermine things. I weaken them. Through my own weakness, I weaken others.”

“Stop,” Myka tells her. “You don’t weaken me. You confuse me, and sometimes you frighten me, but… when I’m with you, I don’t feel weak. I feel strong.”

“You _are_ strong,” Helena says immediately.

“So are you,” Myka says.

Helena turns bitter. “You saw me. That had nothing to do with strength.”

“Then do better next time!”

“Will there be a next time?” Helena asks. She asks it as a genuine question, and Myka is incredulous at the idea that she does not already know the answer.

So Myka goes to her. Takes both her hands. Kisses her mouth. “I was afraid I might never get to do that again.” She pulls Helena into her arms. “I want there to always be a next time.” She feels, on some level, ridiculous, saying this to Helena, who knows so much more, has seen so much more. Myka fears she has said too much.

But: “So do I,” Helena says. She smiles. “Mrs. Frederic thinks you are on the whole good for me.”

“She warned me, though,” Myka says. “That she can’t protect us. At least I think that’s what she was saying.”

“Interpreting Mrs. Frederic is not a game for amateurs.”

“I see that.”

“I will protect you,” Helena says. “I swear I will.”

“You swore to Mr. Nielsen too,” Myka reminds her.

“Actually,” Helena says, with something resembling her usual flair, “he is misremembering. In fact, I swore _at_ him.”

Myka laughs.

They resume.

And it is easy… so easy.

****

But it is difficult as well.

It becomes even more difficult when, in the wake of Myka’s apparently satisfactory performance in the nurse picture, she is thrown into her first lead role: she is a last-minute replacement for Myrna Loy, who, claiming exhaustion, has embarked on a European vacation. (“Contract,” Steve tells Myka. “She wants a new contract.”) Myka will be starring in a melodrama that was planned for Loy with her usual screen partner, William Powell. Myka feels that she is being set up for failure, that she will be seen as an interloper breaking up Nick and Nora Charles. Helena disagrees. She pushes Myka to make the most of the opportunity.

As the star-making machinery around Myka picks up speed, however, Helena grows increasingly cautious. Their time together becomes even more fleeting, stolen.

They steal a tiny bit on the set, during the first week of the five-week shoot. Helena visits: she can do this without arousing suspicion, for she and Bill Powell are friends of long standing.

“H.G.!” Bill exclaims when he sees her. He and Myka are waiting for a change in lighting to be completed.

“Bill!” Helena exclaims back. She smiles widely as she approaches.

They kiss each other’s cheeks, as Europeans do. Watching them, Myka turns instantly back into the green girl from Colorado, the one who knows nothing at all. The distance between her and these two stars is vast, and it seems to grow as each second passes.

But then Helena says, in a much softer voice, “What do you think of my Myka?” And the distance vanishes.

Bill winks at Myka. His blue eyes are so light, so arresting, that Myka sometimes finds herself unable to look away. “I think she’s charming. And she’s doing yeoman work in the picture, stepping in for Myrna like this.”

“But you two are so wonderful together; she’d be so much better than I am,” Myka says. She’s said it before; she’ll say it several more times, because she knows it’s true. “If anything ends up going well here, it’s all thanks to you.”

“Nonsense,” Bill assures her. He is so very sweet.

“Quite a lovefest, I see,” Helena comments.

“Don’t concern yourself, H.G. You know my heart belongs to another.” He’s talking about Jean Harlow. They have been together for just about as long as Myka and Helena have.

“How is she? Our paths haven’t crossed in ages.”

“Come see for yourself!” Bill tells her. “The two of you should come to dinner.”

Helena frowns. “You know that’s impossible.”

“Well, here’s an idea: we’ll use it! ‘Bill Powell, famous Hollywood peacemaker, invites his new costar and his old friend to dinner in an attempt to broker a ceasefire.’ I’ll fail in my attempt, obviously, and you can resume hostilities right after dessert.”

At this, Helena laughs. “I’m tempted,” she says. “Myka?”

Myka is more than tempted. Myka thinks the idea of having dinner with Helena _and other people_ is heavenly. And yet it is an impossible fantasy: Steve will never agree to it, now that the stakes are getting higher. So many things are out of reach.

It is strange even to be standing here, having something like a normal conversation, with another person, in daylight. Yet the daylight on the set, Myka knows, is artificial.

****

Most of Helena’s house is opulent, luxurious, just as a star’s accommodation should be. But there is one smaller room, a book-lined room, one that contains an enormous leather chesterfield chair. Myka learned, early on, that Helena likes to sit in this chair in the morning. She lets the brightening sun stream over her, and she curls and stretches, like a cat, in the chair.

This room sometimes seems to be the only sunlit place where Myka can walk right up to Helena, can drape herself across Helena’s lap, can kiss her deeply, openly. They are completely safe, Myka feels, only in this room. In this chair.

When she does feel safe, these increasingly infrequent times when she feels safe and Helena is fully herself and nothing is fueled or urgent or risky… Myka lets herself imagine _life_ this way. It is sweet torture to imagine the slow awakening with Helena every morning, the time they would spend together every single day, the yielding and release into night. Over and over again.

“What are you thinking about?” Helena asks, as they entwine in the chair on one of their rare mornings together. She pulls at Myka’s loose curls, almost purring as Myka responds by raking her own fingers through Helena’s unbound mane.

“You,” Myka says, nosing against Helena’s temple, her high cheekbone. “Us. Together.” And Helena’s eyes have never shone so bright as this, Myka thinks; her kiss has never been so soft, so sweet, her hands so gentle.

They do not leave the chair. Myka keeps her eyes open; she wants to see Helena, to believe for as long as she can that this woman who gives Myka so much pleasure, so much joy, could possibly be real. That she too is not simply an alluring surface.

And Myka wants to believe that this room is the real world.

****

The shooting of Myka’s first starring role comes to an end. She has two months to wait before the picture is completed and released; in the meantime, she is sent into script meetings for another melodrama. Helena’s next film moves forward as well. They are both busy.

A week may go by without their exchanging so much as a passing word. Myka arrives at Helena’s house after one such week, late in the evening, after briefly stopping in at a party with Pete. She expects Helena to be in her robe, ready for bed. She is astonished to find her sprawled on her sofa, wearing a man’s tuxedo. Down to the bow tie.

“Do you know what day it is?” Helena asks her.

“‘Dress like Fred Astaire’ Day?” Myka tries.

“You are funny. And perhaps it is. But if you will cast your mind back, you may remember that one year ago today, you did me the very great favor of walking into this house for the first time.” She smiles. “And so do you know what we are going to do tonight, in honor of that occasion?”

Myka shakes her head.

“We are going to celebrate. By which I mean, we are going _out_.”

“Out?” Myka wonders if the definition of that word has changed. Because they cannot possibly be going _out_.

“Yes. To a private club.”

“How? Steve will lose his mind if he finds out!”

“I have already informed Mr. Jinks. His exact words were, ‘why did you tell me that,’ to which I responded, ‘so you will be prepared.’ By which I meant, should anything happen. But it will not.”

“Out where other people are,” Myka says, just to make sure she understands.

“Yes,” Helena says. “Other people. Like us.”

“I see,” Myka says. She leans down to Helena, who is still reclining, and pulls on one end of her tie. The knot collapses.

Helena looks up at her indignantly. “I just tied that! It was perfect!”

“I want to tie it,” Myka says. “So you won’t look quite so perfect. So you’ll look like _us_.”

Helena sits up. She pulls Myka’s head down and kisses her. “Now I don’t want to go out,” she says when they break apart.

“Oh no,” says Myka. “You don’t tease me with the idea of a nightclub and then not come through. You save that other idea for later.”

“I will,” Helena assures her.

****

In the limousine, Helena takes out her packet of cocaine. She has been using it far more judiciously, but she still does use it.

Myka has, in general, resigned herself to this, but: “Don’t,” she says. “Not tonight.”

Helena nods and puts the packet away.

****

Myka knows the club isn’t the real world, no more than the studio is the real world. But just like the studio, it creates a version of the world that is better, smoother, more elegant.

They dance together. On a dance floor. They are actually quite bad at it; they have never danced before. They bicker about who should lead. “I’m taller,” Myka says, “and I had dancing lessons.”

“Everyone at the studio knows they were unsuccessful,” Helena tells her.

Myka steps on Helena’s foot. On purpose this time.

Helena laughs.

They smile at other couples; they say hello. Helena clearly knows some of these women, but everyone is discreet. Some wear gowns, as Myka does; some dress like Helena. Some smoke cigars; some use cigarette holders.

They drink whiskey; they drink Champagne. Not anywhere near the point of oblivion, however, for as Helena says into Myka’s ear—because she can put her mouth right next to Myka’s ear here—“I believe we have plans for later.”

Myka shudders.

During the ride home, Helena sits across from Myka. She is just _looking_ , drawing out the anticipation. She touches her tie, adjusts slightly the knot that Myka made. She clears her throat. She says, “I love you.”

She has never said that before.

“I hoped you would,” Myka says carefully.

“I didn’t want to burden you.”

At this, Myka rolls her eyes. “You are insane,” she pronounces.

“I am certainly not insane!”

“ _Burden_ me? You lunatic. Stop being noble, stop protecting me, stop all of it. Right now. Because I love you too. You’re a complete idiot, and I love you too.”

Helena keeps her distance across the car. But Myka watches as something that she can read only as joy suffuses Helena’s features.

Once they reach the house, they stumble inside, now locked together; during the walk to the door, Myka has undone Helena’s tie again, and she is hard at work on the studs that hold her shirt closed. They are annoyingly recalcitrant. Helena tries to kiss her, but Myka says, “I can’t concentrate on trying to get these out if you—”

She can’t try anymore, though, because Helena has pulled violently away from her. She has pulled away, and she is staring into the living room, staring at her sofa. Because there is a man sitting on the sofa. There is a man sitting on the sofa; his face is shadowed.

He sneers—in a voice with inflections that Myka finds oddly familiar—“I see nothing about you has changed, you _invert_.”

And Myka realizes why the inflections are familiar when Helena says, “Charles. Charles. Myka, this is my brother, Charles.”

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

After Helena’s strangled introduction, no one moves for a long moment.

Then Charles stands up. He steps into the light. And Myka sees two things: one, his beauty, from one angle, is as great as that of his sister. In fact, his beauty might surpass that of his sister, but for the second thing Myka sees: the wound that mars his face. The right side of his countenance is jagged and discolored, and his eye is… not fully there.

“Where is your mask?” Helena asks.

“You know this face,” Charles says. “Why should I have any need to hide it from you? I could not have known you would have… company.” He turns his unseeing eye to Myka. “I of course should have surmised. How did you corrupt this one?”

“Don’t,” Helena says, but her voice is weak.

“Don’t what?” Charles laughs. “Don’t speak about what you are? A perverted seducer of girls? A magnet for depravity? Really, Helena, given the display I just witnessed, I have an idea that this one is quite familiar with all of that.”

“Don’t,” Helena says again. “Please. Please. Leave her be.”

“Is she _important_ to you, Helena?”

“Please.”

“You should know better than to let anyone become _important_ to you.”

“Please,” Helena says again. She turns to Myka. “Take the car.” She sounds like she is dying. “Take the car, and go home.”

“But what about—”

“Please.”

Myka sees that she has no real choice. She wants to gather Helena in her arms; she wants to kiss her; she wants to touch her, just once, to assure herself, to assure them both, that nothing terrible will happen. But Helena is too far away. And Charles is watching. With his one eye, Charles is watching.

****

Twenty minutes later, she is knocking on the door of Steve’s apartment. She knows where he lives because she and Pete have sometimes dropped him off at the end of the day, on their way to whatever nightclub or restaurant is on their agenda for the evening. She knocks as discreetly as she can; his neighbors do not need to know that one of the sad creatures he helps to protect is desperate to see his friendly face.

“Who’s there?” she hears, and then he opens the door. “Myka? What’s wrong?” He is wearing simple blue cotton pajamas, and his hair, usually combed back perfectly, is disarranged into short red curls.

Myka shakes her head.

“Oh my god. Someone saw you. Was it a photographer? I _knew_ this would happen! I told H.G. it was a bad idea, but oh, she was just ecstatic at the idea of surprising you. I’ve never seen her like that; I couldn’t say no to her. I should have, I should have stood up to her, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” He buries his head in his hands. His pale fingers comb through his curls, and Myka wants to cradle him to her, those curls, that sweet face. This is not his fault, and she cannot let him think so.

She finds her voice. “No, Steve, when we went out, it was… it was wonderful. It was perfect. It was. But then when we went home.” She stalls.

“What happened?” Steve demands. “Tell me! Are you all right? Is H.G.?”

“I don’t know,” Myka says. “Her brother was there. Waiting for us. Her brother Charles. He said terrible things to her. About me, about us…”

“Her brother? I thought he died, or… I mean, he was in the war.”

“He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s in her house.” Now Myka is pulling her hands through her own hair. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Steve. I didn’t know who else to go to.”

“We’ll figure something out. She’ll come to work tomorrow; she has to. It’s all right, Myka. We’ll figure it out. We’ll fix it. We’ll fix it tomorrow.”

But Myka doubts that. They don’t even know what the problem is. How can they possibly fix it?

****

Myka tries to find Helena at the studio the next day. She throws her caution away and, every break she has, asks everyone she sees if they’ve seen Helena, where she’s shooting, _whether_ she’s shooting. But the place seems to expand, becoming more incomprehensible than it has ever been before: someone thinks she’s in wardrobe; no, she’s in makeup; no, it is portraits today; no, perhaps they are lensing over on Lot 2. In over a year, Myka has never covered so much of the ground of this vast campus as she does today.

As evening comes, she begins to despair. Helena is everywhere and nowhere. Steve has tried to find out about Charles, what he could possibly be doing here, but he has come up empty too.

Myka remembers that Steve had said, some time ago, that maybe Mrs. Frederic knew something about Helena’s past. But Myka just can’t bring herself to approach the woman; there will be a time, she is certain, when she needs Mrs. Frederic’s help even more than she does today.

She has one more alternative, she feels. One more. She is terrified of this option too, but it is the only thing she can think of now. And she has to find out _something_.

****

“You should not be seen here,” is the first thing Greta Garbo says when she opens the door of her bungalow to Myka.

Myka almost says out loud that she is _fed up with_ being told where she can and can’t be seen. But lashing out at Garbo will do her far more harm than good… so many things will do her far more harm than good. “I know,” she says. “But I need to talk to you… to ask you…”

“About Wells.” Her accent is far thicker than it is when she is acting; Helena’s name comes out “Wess.”

Myka nods, and Garbo sighs. “Young Myka Bering,” she says—from Garbo’s mouth, Myka’s name sounds like “Meekah Beering,” but Myka has no thought of correcting her. “I think you are the same age as Wells, when she came here. But you are not wild. Foolish, perhaps, to take up with Wells. But not wild.”

“It isn’t foolish,” Myka says. She can’t let that pass.

Garbo shrugs. “We will see.”

“Why was she wild?” Myka asks.

Garbo shrugs again. “Let us say, youth.”

“No,” says Myka. “No, it’s more than that. I just met her brother. What do you know about him?”

“Ah,” says Garbo. “The brother. So you know that much.”

“I don’t know anything!” Myka says, a small howl of frustration.

“What he suffered? His _injury_?” Garbo asks.

“I saw it,” Myka admits. “His face.”

“No,” Garbo says. “You misunderstand. Not only his face, though I know of his face, the mask he wears to hide it. Far worse than that. It is this: he fights in the war. He lives through the Somme, the shell-shock begins for him. He says he is not a coward. He stays. At last it is almost over, the war, but then the bomb. The face, the eye, the arm, the other wounds. The arm he keeps. The eye he loses. The face he loses.” She shakes her head. “Wells is so young, young when he leaves, young when he returns. He is years in hospital, but she spends so much time on him. More even than the parents—they cannot look at their son. But Wells looks.”

Myka says, “He said that. That she knows his face.” She asks, “How young was she?” She could calculate the number. But she needs to hear Garbo say it.

“Twelve when he comes home. She tends him for years.”

Myka thinks about her own teenage years. She read books. She did not look after a shell-shocked, disfigured brother. The war had become history by the time she understood any of what had happened.

“Eight years, ten years,” Garbo continues. “She grows beautiful. She has a chance to act. Her brother resents her beauty, the start of her career. But she is realizing that she must have her own life. She meets people.” And at this, Garbo smiles a little.

Myka is afraid of what will come next.

“She meets one person in particular. A girl like she is. A girl she loves.”

Now Myka is _very_ afraid of what will come next.

And Garbo nods. “Yes. He finds her out. And she tells me that she believes if not for the injury, the shell-shock, it would be better. She could make him understand. But now, he can turn violent. He can be violent, she knows, and he threatens her lover. So you know Wells is noble. Wells gives her up. And then…”

“And then she gets the offer to come here.”

Garbo nods. “Because of the talkie pictures. You know her voice. This is what they want. They think she is good for small parts, but then… you can see what happens. You see her magnetism, the camera’s love for her. She is a smash success. But it is too much. She loses her balance.”

“You helped her get it back,” Myka says.

Garbo smiles again. “Wells is not a fool. She is young then, and wild, because she has never had freedom.” There is a look in Garbo’s eyes that gashes into Myka. Garbo is clearly remembering that Helena, young and wild, free for the first time… Garbo touched that, she held that, she _had_ that. A part of Myka wants to cry and rage over that Helena being tamed, though she’s seen the sad echo of that wildness, the places it still can lead her despite the taming. But young and wild… Myka would have been too afraid to touch her; she would have burned and burned and burned. But the _idea_ of it… Myka practically itches with covetousness. She itches, too, with the anxiety, still, that she herself cannot help but fall short in comparison to this magnificent creature. How overwhelming she and Helena must have been together, how they must have seared the very air around them…

She wonders if her green eyes have turned greener still when Garbo says, almost apologetically, “But you see, there is a game—no, many games. She learns their rules.”

“But she still broke them. Even after you. She breaks them now, too.”

“Yet you take up with her anyway.”

“I didn’t know at first.”

Garbo dismisses this as the nonsense it is with an expression of signature blankness.

“All right,” Myka concedes, “I knew. I knew, and like you said, I took up with her anyway. I could have said no, but I didn’t want to. And now…”

“This does not end well,” Garbo tells her.

“I don’t want it to end,” Myka responds.

“You and Wells,” Garbo says. “You are the opposites. She is wild, but not a fool. You? No wild in you. But I do think you are a fool.”

Myka feels like one today. “Maybe,” she says. And then, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me for this,” Garbo says. “I don’t think it will help you, simply to know of her past.”

Myka thinks it will. Or it could. But she says, “Not for that. For before. For saving her.”

Garbo tosses her head back and laughs. “You _are_ a fool,” she says. “But I wish you and Wells good luck all the same.”

****

Steve is the one who finds Helena. He finds her the next day, and Myka knows he has found her because he runs pell-mell into Myka’s photo shoot. “I think it’s lunchtime!” he pants. “Myka, I think it’s time for lunch and you’re probably very hungry, so maybe you could break now?”

Myka looks at the photographer, who says, “If we can still finish by two, it’s okay. I have to work on lights for the Crawford shoot then, and Mr. Hurrell…”

Steve nods impatiently. “She’ll be back soon. Soonish. You’ll get your shots here, and Mr. Hurrell will get his of Crawford.”

The photographer says, “You can leave for the day, as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t want any decent shots of Miss Bering. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“I want decent shots,” Steve says, as sternly as Myka’s ever heard Steve say anything. “Her picture’s out soon. She’s the _star_. So they’d better be more than decent, thank you.”

He hustles Myka out, whispering, “You remember Margaret, in editing? She said she was okay with clearing out for a while. So H.G.’s going to meet you in Margaret’s cutting room. It’s the last one down that one hallway, remember?”

“Where was she yesterday?” Myka asks.

Steve says, “I don’t think she was ready to talk to you.”

Myka is afraid of what it might mean that she is ready now.

****

Cutting rooms are forests of film. The lines of hooks from which fluttering strips hang, the stacked reels that sit sturdily everywhere, the moviolas jutting from the tables… and the smell of this forest is every bit as distinct as, though completely different from, one outdoors: here, instead of the pines and cleanliness of home, Myka smells heady adhesive, tangy nitrate acidity, and almost always, a soft yet pungent undercurrent of stale coffee.

Cutting rooms are also dim and private.

Myka knows that shadowed privacy is exactly what she and Helena need, exactly what they can have here… but the contrast between this and the bright lights of the club, less than two days ago, threatens to tear her apart. As she waits, the contrast seems to increase, until she is thinking only of the difference between light and dark. She is so tired of the dark.

She hears the door open and close. The film strips swing back and forth, providing a momentary swishing soundtrack.

“I hate this,” Myka says. “I hate that we have to hide.”

“We don’t,” Helena says. Her voice is flat. If before, it was dying, now it is completely lifeless.

Myka turns around. Helena _looks_ dead. She is pale, but more than that—she seems not really there. She seems nothing but a ghost.

“We don’t have to do anything,” Helena says.

“Helena,” Myka says. “That wasn’t what I meant. You know that wasn’t what I meant.”

She begins to move toward Helena, but Helena raises a hand. “No. Don’t.”

“I can’t touch you anymore? Suddenly it’s wrong because your brother thinks it is?”

Helena turns away. “You don’t know anything about him. About the two of us.”

Myka defies Helena’s wishes: she goes to her, presses up against her back, slides her hands down Helena’s arms, wraps both her arms and Helena’s around Helena’s body. Helena starts to shake. Myka draws her closer, trying to convey still more tenderness, more love; trying to create a space of some kind of safety. This Helena needs no taming; this Helena needs to be sheltered. “Yes, I do,” Myka says. “I talked to Garbo. She told me… well, she told me what she knew. I’m sure there’s more, but she told me what she knew, about Charles and his injuries, about what you did for him. And about what he did to you. How he made you leave your—”

“Don’t say anything more,” Helena interrupts. “Don’t.”

Her tone makes Myka feel sick. Sick and terrified. “Why not? Is she still so… is she still who you…”

“Even if she were,” Helena says, “it would make no difference. For that is why Charles came here, you see: to tell me… to _gloat_ … that she is dead.”

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

_Photoplay_ magazine, January 1936, excerpt from feature article “She’s a Loner!”:

     “….Helena’s still at the top of the Hollywood mountain. She speaks warmly of most of her fellow shining stars, even offering praise for her longtime rival, the great Garbo: ‘Her work, particularly lately, has been just marvelous,’ she says. But mention that up-and-comer Myka Bering, and the room turns decidedly chilly. ‘New talent is always welcome in Hollywood,’ she says. And the fact that the statuesque beauty got her start in a Wells pic? ‘I’m happy that my picture brought her to the public’s notice.’ Brrr! It’s a good thing Miss B is used to that cold Rocky Mountain air!

     Helena is usually so serious about her work that she has little time for the glittering Hollywood scene. She’s been living a quiet, almost solitary life in the Hills, and now her brother, a decorated war vet, has come over from jolly old England to keep her company. It’s less lonely with him around, she says, a bit wistfully.

     When will our Helena Wells find love? Maybe someday soon, if she decides to give up her loner ways—and go out and look for it!”

****

“I’d much rather you stay in to find love,” Myka says after reading this aloud. “But if you have to go out to get to it…”

“I don’t know why you even look at that nonsense,” Helena complains.

“Where else am I going to find out what you’re up to?” Myka asks. She is almost serious.

Because a great deal has changed.

****

The cutting-room floor. Everyone knew, that was where you didn’t want any of your lines, your scenes, your close-ups ending up. And when Helena had fallen to that floor, still clasped in Myka’s arms, and begun to sob, Myka was certain that it was also not the place to try to understand, and counter, years upon years of damage and shame and running and hiding.

“Ssh,” she said. It felt feeble. She had never seen a grown person cry like this, not even her mother when she got the news of _her_ mother’s death.

“I’m sorry,” Helena said over and over as she cried. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t apologize to me. Please. You didn’t do anything to me.”

“I’m sorry for everything. All of it. All the things I’ve done.”

Myka said, “You haven’t done anything wrong. I know you loved her.” She choked a little, saying that, but she went on, “You loved her, and you gave her up. To protect her.”

“If I had stayed with her, she might still be alive. She might, Myka. Charles said she died in a car wreck. A car wreck. A car wreck, and her husband was driving. Her husband, Myka! She married him because of me, because I told her I could never truly love her! And that was a terrible lie, because I did love her. I did love her. I did love her.”

Every iteration of that sentence lanced Myka’s heart. She was already unsure of competing with Garbo—the living, breathing Garbo. But she could not see any way to contend with an idealized phantom from the past, someone Helena was saying over and over that she did love.

“Of course you loved her,” Myka said. “Helena, she must have known that. She must have known that you were trying to protect her, in the only way you could.”

“How could she have known?” Helena demanded. “Already, I was an actor. A liar, a fraud. I am very good at that part of the job. The lying.”

Myka did not think she could counter this, for Helena _was_ good at that part of the job. She was surpassingly believable. She always seemed genuinely to _be_ whoever the script called for, even if that was a queen she disdained, an aviatrix whose bravery she doubted, a blackmail victim whose naïveté she mocked. She had been all of these, and many more, and audiences believed each and every one to be a true emanation of her personality.

Myka wondered if they would believe this Helena: this one on the cutting-room floor.

As Helena’s weeping began slowly to abate, she sat up a bit straighter. She said, still not turning around to look at Myka, “I at least will not make the same mistake twice.”

Then she did look at Myka. “I love you. I told you so two days ago, and I tell you again now. I love you.”

“You loved _her_ ,” Myka couldn’t help but say.

“I did. But that was already truly past when I first met you. Rather, when I first saw you.” She ducked her head. “I think I knew. That first day, I think I knew.”

“On the set?” Myka asked.

“No—weeks before that. You caught me smoking when I should not have been. I was playing truant from a meeting. Do you remember?”

“Of course I do,” Myka said. “It was my first day. But why would _you_ ever have remembered that?”

“I think you underestimate yourself,” Helena said. “But I don’t.”

“Underestimate yourself?”

“No. Underestimate you. And that is why I am making sure you know that I love you, so you will remember that you never should settle for less than that from anyone.”

“From _anyone_? When did _anyone_ get involved in this?” Myka felt a spinning sensation, as if suddenly everything was about to turn again—

And abruptly, everything did, for Helena said, “When I determined, Myka, that we must stop this. We must. Charles is staying; my father sent a telegram to say that he is no longer welcome at home. He has nowhere else to go. And while I must take him in, I will not let him hurt you.”

“He won’t.”

“But he will. If he sees that you truly are important to me? He will be moved to harm you, and I will not have that. I will not let it happen.”

“Let me see if I understand you. You think that the best way to solve this problem is for you to assure me that you love me, and then to never see me again?”

“If it protects you? Of course.”

“But what about how _I_ feel?”

Helena did not have an immediate response to that.

“I think we’re both in this,” Myka said. “And I think we don’t want to get out. Do you really want to give this up?” She kissed Helena then, as well and as thoroughly as she knew how. And she knew she’d indeed done well when, as she pulled away, Helena seized her by the neck and pulled their mouths back together for several desperate moments more.

“Well, then,” Myka said when she could speak again. “I think you don’t want to give this up. And I _know_ I don’t. So we will figure something out, Helena. We’ve done well enough up till now. Not perfectly, but well enough. Haven’t we?”

Helena said, “I like you like this—so sure of yourself. I always knew you were stronger than I.”

Myka kissed her again. “No one here is stronger than anyone else. I think we’re pretty well-matched.”

At these words, Helena assumed an almost happy expression. “Do you?”

Myka answered her with yet another kiss.

****

They cannot go to Helena’s house anymore—Charles is always there, it seems, always watching. Helena has told him that Myka was nothing but a dalliance, an attractive young thing whom she did think she could persuade into her bed. But Myka wants to be a star, Helena tells Charles, so she has demanded that Helena leave her alone. Charles seems to believe it, but he does not relax his vigilance.

So they find other ways. They meet in hotels—Helena, whom the fan magazines have begun repeatedly urging (at Steve’s urging) to look for love, will go to a dance at the Hollywood Hotel, and Myka will be waiting for her in a room upstairs. Or she will deceive Charles about the time that a dinner is likely to end, and she will visit Myka at _her_ house—for Myka, having impressed the bosses at the studio, now has a new contract, and she has bought a small house in Los Feliz’s Oaks.

Once, Myka goes to dinner with Pete at a restaurant very near a theater where Helena is attending a premiere. Myka puts her foot down after that regarding any future assignations in any compartments in any ladies’ lounge, no matter how well-appointed—for, as she points out, “there is not enough room, Helena!” to which Helena responds “you must be more creative” at which point Myka in turn advises, “if you’re so creative, then go back to your theater and figure out someplace else for this to happen!”

Meanwhile, Myka’s picture with Bill Powell debuts. It does remarkably well; Myka begins to be recognized regularly by fans. Steve tells her that she is receiving a good volume of mail at the studio. Her second picture wraps, and she begins a third.

Helena begins another movie with Artie. She complains even more vociferously than usual.

Everything is hectic. If they see each other more than once in a week, once in a fortnight, it is a miracle.

****

One night, after midnight, Myka’s doorbell rings. She gets out of bed, pulls on her dressing gown, and peeks out the window.

The Pierce-Arrow is in her driveway.

She flies out of her bedroom, worried that something is wrong—why would Helena send her car here? If anything’s happened to her…

Myka opens her door to… a very tipsy Helena. “I drank him under the table,” Helena says in what she seems to think is a conspiratorial whisper, but is actually a surprisingly loud burble of sound.

“You drank who under the table? Charles?”

Helena nods solemnly. “He won’t wake up for _hours_. I know it. Hours and hours and hours. And do you know what I determined, my beautiful darling dearest beloved darling?”

Myka is trying _very hard_ not to laugh. “What did you determine?”

“I can say that I had an early call time at the studio. That I had to leave before he awakened. So we have _all night_. And _all morning_.”

She is just so _proud_ of herself, smiling hugely, swaying slightly, that Myka thinks she may die of love for her.

Instead, she pulls Helena inside by her shirt front. “You’re going to wake the neighbors,” she says.

Helena is, not surprisingly, unconcerned. “I think we should be _very_ loud,” she informs Myka.

“Really?” Myka tries to ask, but Helena has already begun to kiss her, to run her fingers up and down the side seams of Myka’s dressing gown.

“Really,” Helena says between light touches of her lips. “Really. Really. Really.”

“You had better give me something to be loud _about_ , then,” Myka advises.

“I don’t think that will be a problem.” Her fingers now discover a small rip in the left-side seam of Myka’s dressing gown. “Tsk. You really should do your mending. Or find yourself some decent help.”

“I could,” Myka says, and her head falls back as Helena’s fingertip finds her skin. “Or I could just buy a new one.”

“Then I suppose you won’t be needing this one anymore, will you?” Helena asks. She can be so very straight-faced when she wants to be—and it all drives Myka crazy, that impassive tone, that deadpan look, those deliberate movements, how she can so easily still herself when Myka is about to _combust_. It turns Myka back into the naive girl she was when this began: playable, pliable.

Helena kisses Myka again, now with control; now her hand begins to rip at the seam, tearing her way into the gown to get to Myka. The kisses grow less restrained, deeper, and Myka gains enough of her senses to begin moving to her bedroom, dragging Helena along, as the torn gown becomes less and less of anything resembling a garment.

It turns out, in the end, to be quite fortunate that they have _all morning_ in addition to _all night_.

This is because when they reach the bedroom—when Myka turns away from Helena to shed what remains of that dressing gown—Helena takes it as an opportunity to collapse onto the bed and fall heavily asleep.

“Apparently there was a small flaw in your plan,” Myka says when Helena awakens in the morning. Myka has been propped on an elbow, watching her sleep… she has so few opportunities to do that these days. It is a luxury, an extravagance, just to lie here and watch her face move, her eyelids flutter, her lips part, her chest rise and fall.

“Well,” Helena says, clearly embarrassed.

“I believe you owe me a new dressing gown,” Myka tells her.

“One will be delivered today,” Helena promises.

“And that’s not all you owe me,” Myka says, moving smoothly under the sheet, gliding nearer to Helena, sliding on top of her. “You said you would give me something to be loud about.”

“Did I,” Helena drawls. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“That’s what you said last night. I think you’re just a big talker.”

Helena smiles up at her, that familiarly bright morning smile that Myka now so rarely sees. “I think no one should be talking at all.”

****

It is not enough. It is nowhere near enough. But they are together when they can be; they are in love all the time; and they are as happy as the circumstances allow.

****

In September 1936, the powerful producer Irving Thalberg dies. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer closes down completely on the day of his funeral, which is attended by hundreds and hundreds of people—big names, smaller names, nearly every name that is a name, certainly those from M-G-M. Pete and Myka sit together. Myka sees Helena with Mrs. Frederic, very near Louis B. Mayer.

From that day, a pall descends on M-G-M. And the studio that Myka has become so much more confident at negotiating—the studio that Helena and a few others seem to know so well that it is truly a home to them—that studio begins to change.

TBC


	8. Chapter 8

More death: Jean Harlow, William Powell’s love, dies in June of 1937. It is sickeningly sudden; she is only twenty-six.

Bill is devastated. The funeral is horrible, almost worse for those who are his friends than for those who knew Harlow well.

“I cannot imagine living without you,” Helena tells Myka, after a dark, frantic hour together, only days after that sad service. “If you died… I could not even mourn you in public. Bill at least had that. He at least had that.”

Myka admonishes her, “Bill doesn’t have anything right now. We have each other.”

“Until you walk out the door,” Helena says. She is in a mood for self-pity, Myka sees. She understands. She loses her equilibrium sometimes as well.

They have been hiding, now, for almost three years.

****

It is rare for weather, for the atmosphere, to change utterly without warning; usually, one feels a slow rise or fall in temperature or pressure, a gradual speeding up of winds—one gust, now two. A smattering of raindrops before a storm.

Myka begins to sense flurries, flutters in the air. There have always been murmurs, but now she hears more of them, louder, more “did you hear about…” and “be careful…” The gossip columns are ever more popular, and even a whiff of scandal is enough to set the hounds upon any star, no matter how renowned.

Even Garbo’s pictures have begun to underperform, not languishing at the box office, exactly, but garnering less excitement all the same. Mr. Mayer had already brought in Luise Rainer, from Austria, to jolt Garbo, to show her that she was no longer the singular, untouchable foreigner, that others with less baggage could replace her. Garbo was never completely invulnerable before, but now she is visibly weakening.

Helena seems safe for the time being. She and Mr. Nielsen are still a team—she had thought that with Thalberg’s death, their partnership might be dissolved. She had anticipated it, and she had also, she confessed to Myka, feared it. For all her protestations, Helena has all along understood Artie’s value to her, as insurance, as protection. She needs that insurance now more than ever.

Looming also, especially among the European expatriates, is the threat of war. They are made jittery by the news from home: Hitler’s rise in Germany, Italian forces in Africa, civil war in Spain. Helena tells Myka that Charles’s moods are darkening as the idea takes hold in his mind that his war, the one that was to end war, barely even delayed Germany’s next rise. That everything he has been through was for absolutely nothing. That it may in fact have prepared the ground for something far worse.

Darkness is falling in many ways.

****

Steve is good at his job, Myka knows. He is an up-and-comer—those he handles, including Myka, have done very well—and he could someday run the entire publicity department. He is ambitious; he wants the chance to move into those larger chairs, larger offices.

So Steve acquires a girlfriend. Her name is Claudia Donovan, and she is a recent addition to the editing department.

“Does she… know?” Myka asks him.

“She didn’t at first,” he says. He looks… Myka’s first thought is “sad,” but that isn’t quite right. He looks older. Of course he _is_ older, as is Myka. She remembers how young and green they both were when they met, though he was of course so much more tuned in to the world they traveled through. She understands now that his knowledge, his ease, came in large part from his connection to other men—those “in the life,” as Steve used to occasionally allow himself to say. He doesn’t say that anymore.

Myka wonders what all of them—herself, Steve, Helena, Garbo, all the other names she could list—are in now.

****

“Don’t,” Myka says to Helena. Helena waves her off and inhales her cocaine.

Months have passed, and now Helena is the one being threatened. Every actress in Hollywood, it seems, has been tested for the role of a generation: Scarlett O’Hara in producer David O. Selznick’s “Gone with the Wind.” Selznick is an independent producer, so he can go anywhere he wants for talent, but Mr. Mayer has made him a deal: M-G-M will give Clark Gable to Selznick—Gable is the public’s preferred Rhett Butler—for the right to distribute the picture. Implicit in the deal is the idea that Metro actresses would be put at the front of the line as choices for Scarlett.

Myka tested for the part—well, she tried to test for the part. She will not delude herself about it: she was terrible. She cannot speak in a Southern accent to save her life, and when she tried, the cameraman shooting the test erupted into laughter. “My fault,” he apologized, “we’ll do it again.”

“Don’t bother,” Myka told him.

She was not, in fact, particularly disappointed, because she knew who was truly at the front of that casting line: Helena Wells.

Steve had said, “I think it’s down to H.G. and Paulette Goddard. I heard Jean Arthur, too, but I really can’t see that, can you?”

Myka couldn’t. But she hoped, in an odd way, that it was true; she’d met Jean Arthur only once, but she thought, at the time, that she understood something about her. Helena had confirmed that later, “although not from personal experience,” she had added quickly.

“What kind of experience, then?” Myka asked.

“Mutual friends,” Helena said. “She and I both—”

“That’s enough,” Myka said. “I shouldn’t ask questions I don’t want to know the answer to.”

Jean Arthur had seemed so clearly to be the dark horse that everyone was blindsided by the approach of the real dark horse: a raven-haired British beauty named Vivien Leigh.

A raven-haired British beauty, that is, _not_ named Helena Wells.

This very afternoon, the studio gossip machine reported, the casting was made official.

Myka and Helena had already arranged to meet at night, in a downtown hotel room, but the news had almost made Myka want to call it off. She was afraid of what would greet her at the door of that hotel room.

Helena was philosophical at first. “I knew,” she said. “I felt it. There is trouble brewing everywhere; I suppose I should be glad that this is the tack they have decided on, rather than creating a scandal and pushing me out.”

“They don’t exactly have to create one,” Myka pointed out. “Here we are.”

“They don’t want to push _you_ out,” Helena told her. “ _You_ have a future.”

“Helena. Stop it. Your pictures are doing fine.”

Helena shrugged. “For now. But I am over thirty years old. I see that there is no reason to give me such a large role when I have so little screen life left in me. Far better they should launch a new career. Far better.” She nodded.

Myka really did, for a moment, have a thought that that might be the end of it. That Helena really would accept the situation and move forward.

Because Myka herself had never been particularly fragile—because she fell almost accidentally into acting instead of seeking it out—she tended to forget that actors were so often brittle behind their attractive faces. Helena was as delicate as any of them, more so because of her particular circumstances.

So when Helena had taken out the cocaine, Myka had been surprised, but only for a moment.

“Don’t,” she repeats.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Helena says. She inhales again. “I would like to feel better.”

“I’d like to think that the fact that you’re here with me could make you feel better.”

“Any other day,” Helena says heavily.

“But today I’m not enough for you. Because you lost one part?”

“Not because I lost one part!” Helena says. “Because this is the beginning of the end!”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Myka tells her.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Helena says again.

“I don’t think I want to tell you much of anything right now,” Myka says. She feels herself tearing up, though she is not a crier: she is not interested in having Helena see her break down, so she begins to gather her things.

“Where are you going?” Helena asks. Her voice is less harsh than it was a moment ago; Myka can hear the drug in it. She will speed up in a moment, speed up and gain that engaging intensity, and she will be irresistible, and Myka will fall again.

She does want to cry.

She does want to leave.

But she wants, more, to stay. She wants to stay—for days, weeks, months, years—until she can convince Helena that she, Myka, is truly a constant, that all the rest may age or fade or be taken away. She tries not to think about the small number of days they have actually spent together. She doubts it would add up to any significant number of weeks, much less months. It would almost make more sense to count hours.

So if Helena will not value these hours, tonight, then Myka will value them for her. She takes the cocaine away from a now unresisting Helena. She undresses Helena, undresses herself. She says, “I love you.” She says it as many times as she can. She feels guilty for enjoying herself, for enjoying what Helena does to her, for accepting her hands, her tongue, her unapologetic overstimulation.

But she does accept it. She has always accepted this side of Helena. And she has, she admits to the darkness, always enjoyed it, even while at the same time she wishes it could be banished forever.

****

Months later, the fact that “Gone with the Wind” is the huge success it was predicted, predicted and destined, to be does not help matters. It also does not help matters that Helena has, like Garbo with “Ninotchka,” now been assigned to a comedy. Helena hates comedy, even more than Garbo does. She has complained; she has threatened not to show up for work. No one believes that she will make good on such threats, least of all Myka.

But when Helena is unhappy, she is extremely committed to making those around her unhappy as well. The night after Vivien Leigh’s casting comes to seem less and less anomalous as time goes on.

There is war in Europe now.

And Helena is unhappy, but Charles is worse. Being at home with him is nearly intolerable, she tells Myka. He says foul things to her, malevolent things. She does not know what she can do to help him. There have been doctors; there has been medication, but he does not want to take it. Helena does not understand his reluctance to erase the pain.

“Don’t,” Myka warns her, often.

Sometimes Helena heeds her; more often she does not.

But it is becoming ever harder for them to find time even to be unhappy together. As Charles deteriorates, his paranoia regarding Helena increases.

And as Helena deteriorates, her playfulness with regard to planning trysts, to simply finding time to spend on and with Myka, decreases.

They have been hiding for five years.

****

When Myka receives a between-takes note that Steve wants to see her, she thinks little of it at first. Lunch plans, perhaps, or a need to schedule another portrait shoot. An appearance at a public event, something to do with the war, perhaps. Hollywood is squarely on the side of the Allies, and support for the British, in particular, is strong.

She begins to think a bit more of it, though, when the assistant who brought the note whispers, “You should probably go now.” His tone is confidential, and now she thinks it is some new rumor, that there is some new need to show the columnists, the fan magazines, the fans themselves, that Myka is not who she is.

The studio seems particularly busy, particularly crowded today. So many people streaming through it, streaming by Myka, all of them with lives that Myka knows nothing about. She does not care what they do. Why does anyone care what she does? Why does Charles care what Helena does?

She opens the door to Steve’s office, expecting to see him fretting alone, pale with his now-customary anxiety.

Steve _is_ pale. Steve _is_ anxious. But he is not alone.

Sitting across from his desk are two people. First she registers Pete, who looks up at Myka and gives her a sickly half-smile. And then she sees Mrs. Frederic, whose expression exhibits nothing even vaguely related to a smile.

TBC


	9. Chapter 9

Excerpt from fan letter addressed to Myka Bering, M-G-M Studios, received July 1941:

"I loved you in ‘Doctor and Wife’! I cried and cried when your husband died but then you rebuilt your life and became a doctor too! I could never imagine being a doctor, but you made me think that it’s possible. Because we might be in a war soon, and I want to help people. My little sister thinks you are wonderful too, and we wish we knew you in real life. Could you send an autographed picture?"

****

Steve has mused in the past that while Helena’s star power comes from the way she is _more than_  her fans—her world is larger and more attractive than theirs—Myka’s appeal is different. It may have something to do, he thinks, with her height: they see it as a physical flaw, almost—something she must, ironically, rise above. This makes her _one of them_.

He has never said it’s her acting ability.

This weekend, however, Myka is going to have to give a performance like no other of her life.

She is standing in the kitchen of a ranch house in Sedona, Arizona. She is waiting for Helena.

Who arrives exactly when Mrs. Frederic promised she would, and exactly _how_ Myka expected she would: spitting mad, swearing at being deceived about her destination, ready to verbally flay whoever was ultimately responsible for this foul trickery.

She storms into the house, alone. Clearly the driver of the car that has brought her here has made the wise choice to stay as far away from her as possible.

“Hi,” Myka says as soon as she has a line of sight.

It’s almost comical, how Helena screeches to a complete halt: she stops walking, talking, gesturing. She stares.

“I see you’re a little upset,” Myka says.

“I,” Helena answers, then stops.

“I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“It,” Helena says. “‘It’ _is_ a surprise. And what exactly is ‘it’?”

“Seven years,” Myka tells her, “is a long time.”

Helena gives her a bit of squint, a small head-shake, then says, “Oh.”

“Do you remember what you surprised me with? After one year?”

“Too well,” Helena says ruefully.

“The surprise was wonderful. It was what happened afterward that was a… problem. Wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“I thought it was time for an even better surprise.”

“And I believe I asked before: what exactly is it?”

“This,” Myka says, spreading her arms wide.

“I hate to sound like a simpleton, but: what is this?”

“This is ours,” Myka tells her. “For four days, this is ours.”

Helena looks like a prizefighter the instant after the knockout punch has landed. She is in the living room; she gropes for an armchair and sits. “How did you do this?” she asks. “I never managed anything like this for you.”

“I had a lot of help,” Myka says, and this part is entirely true. “Mrs. Frederic arranged everything with our schedules at the studio, and with Charles. As far as he knows, you’re on a last-minute location shoot. I have no idea why you’d go on location for a movie that we’d normally shoot on one street on Lot 2, but I guess Charles doesn’t know much about the studio.”

“He doesn’t,” Helena says.

“And there’s a distraction in Scottsdale: Bette Davis, who apparently owes Steve a favor, is about to do something very interesting there.”

“What is she doing?”

“Steve said not to ask.”

At this, Helena laughs.

“So,” Myka goes on. “Surprise.” She goes to Helena, goes and sits across her as she used to, in Helena’s chesterfield chair. The afternoon Arizona sun is bright, but differently so than early-morning California light. This sun is brutal.

Helena is obviously reminded as well: “I don’t even have that chair anymore,” she says. “I’m sorry. Charles didn’t like it, and I… just looked at it. And thought.”

“It isn’t a betrayal to get rid of a chair,” Myka says. “It isn’t.” _Says the woman who has had a torn dressing gown hanging in her closet for over four years._

“But I have betrayed you,” Helena says.

Myka is sure that she cannot mean that the way it sounds. “How?” Myka asks.

“Here with you, now, I’m reminded.”

“Of the chair?”

“Of my loss of faith.”

“Faith in what?”

Helena leans up, Myka leans down, and they kiss for the first time here. The first time in at least, Myka thinks but does not want to be certain about, a month.

“I wanted things to change,” Helena says. Her face is flushed—but this blood has risen naturally. Perhaps also for the first time in a month. “When we began, and at so many points thereafter. I wished so fervently for things to change. And they did. Just… not for the better.” She kisses Myka again. It’s not a kiss that is in any way about itself; it reverberates with so many kisses from the past. “Your fidelity puts me to shame.”

“Then do better next time,” Myka says deliberately.

“Will there be a next time?”

It is even more of a question than it was years ago. And Myka’s answer needs to be every bit as convincing now as it was then. “I want there to always be a next time,” she echoes herself. She can hear the distance between now and then; she can feel it in her body.

She can feel Helena’s body beneath her. It is warm, it is familiar, and she wants her hands on every part of it. But she knows that one of their problems is that bodies and their needs have always played too large a part in this—and yet what can they do? Time limits create urgency, and urgency lights fires.

Right now, though, she can wait. They have four days. In seven years, they have never had four days.

****

“Here is what I need you to do,” a still-shocked Myka had told Mrs. Frederic. What she had been thinking, ordering Mrs. Frederic around, she still has no idea, but… “I need to be the one to tell Helena. And I want to take my time, so I want to go away with her. I _will not_ let her hear any of this from anyone else. Can you make that happen? And can you make it happen fast?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Frederic said without hesitation. “It will be difficult perhaps, but I can.”

Steve told Pete, “You’ll have to lie very low while they’re gone. No appearances anywhere. If we’re really going to sell this, that is.”

Pete nodded. “I can do that, no problem.” He turned to Myka. “I’m so sorry, Mykes,” he said for the thousandth time.

“It isn’t your fault,” Myka told him. “I’m the one who’s sorry. You didn’t do anything. This is all me.”

“Well,” Steve said, “and H.G.”

“Steve,” Myka said. “If it were you, would you put any blame at all on the person you loved?”

Steve. Steve and his older eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t loved anyone like that.”

Then Myka, who had up to this point been stoic—stoic or perhaps just stunned—started to cry. “Good,” she told him. “Don’t.”

But the look in those older eyes, then, said that he knew she did not—could never—mean it.

****

They find that they do not remember how to spend a day together. Nights, they are still tolerably familiar with, but days? Days are hours to be filled with real activities that need not have set endpoints, real conversations that need not double as foreplay.

“What do people _do_ in this place?” Helena asks Myka when they awaken after their first night. It was a very quiet night. Quiet, comforting. Intimate. Revenant.

“Outdoorsy things?” Myka guesses. “Hikes? Horses?”

“Hideous,” Helena declares.

“Okay, what would you do at home?”

“Try to keep Charles at bay. I hardly remember how to do anything else.” She does not say this bitterly. It is matter-of-fact. “What would you do?”

“Read,” Myka says immediately. “I kept trying to at the studio, once I started feeling comfortable enough to even bring a book with me, but even though it’s just waiting… you can’t do anything really substantial, can you? I hate reading only one or two pages at a time.”

Helena kisses Myka gently. “Well then,” she says, “we shall find you something to read.” She kisses her again. “And I find that all I desire to do is rest my weary, agèd brow upon your shoulder and occasionally gaze up at you with adoration and wonder.”

“Wonder?” Myka laughs.

“That we are here at all,” Helena says, and Myka understands: she was not teasing or bantering. She was serious.

****

“And I need one other thing,” Myka said.

Mrs. Frederic nodded.

“Don’t agree until I tell you what it is,” Myka warned.

“If it involves the studio, I should be able to help you,” Mrs. Frederic said.

Myka said, “Oh, it involves the studio all right. I want to be cast with Helena in a picture.”

Steve gasped; Myka thought he might faint.

“Because,” she went on, “what difference could it make now? No one will think anything of it, not anymore.”

Mrs. Frederic nodded. “And you want to keep a close eye on her. As this moves forward.”

“I think I’m going to need to,” Myka said.

****

In Sedona, they have a rented car. Myka drove herself to the house—so odd to be the one driving when she is so very accustomed to being driven—and now she drives both of them to the small street that constitutes Sedona’s downtown. Never before have they been in a car together this way, with one driving and the other sitting in the passenger seat. Myka is the driver because Helena, even after twelve years in the United States, has never driven on the right side of the road.

Myka glances over at Helena, in the passenger seat. A hat and sunglasses obscure her face; even here, it is important to at least make an attempt. Besides, this sun would mar the complexion of anyone as fair as Helena, so _anyone_ might be inclined to swathe themselves into unrecognizability. Anyone at all.

Though Helena is the bigger star, Myka is harder to hide. For her, they decide on nothing more than sunglasses and hope.

They find that Sedona has a tiny bookstore. They walk into the bookstore together.

They have never done anything like that before.

****

Myka had stopped dead upon entering Steve’s office. Upon seeing Pete and Mrs. Frederic.

“Who has the story?” she asked.

“Louella,” Steve said.

“How did she get it?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I’ll find out, but I don’t know yet. I just know she has it.”

“What do we do?” Myka asked.

“We do one thing very quickly. It saves you; I think it stops the thing in its tracks.”

“What is the one thing?” she asked, but she knew perfectly well what it was.  Why else would Pete be here?

“You know what it is,” Steve said.

Pete said, and he looked and sounded genuinely ill, “I’m sorry, Myka, Mykes, I swear we’ll still just be pals, I swear.”

“It saves me,” Myka said. “What about Helena?”

Steve shook his head. “She doesn’t have H.G. She just has you.”

That made no sense at all. “How could anyone know about me and not Helena? There’s nothing to know about me without Helena!”

“I don’t know,” Steve admitted. “Mrs. Frederic? Any ideas?”

Mrs. Frederic shook her head.

Myka had known that a day like this was likely to come. She had worried over it, lost sleep and her appetite over it. She had imagined all the ways it could happen—or so she’d thought. She had not thought it would afford her a small back door.

“If they don’t have Helena, then she has to be made to believe that I’m doing this for Pete,” she said. “Because a story about him and Amanda is going to break.”

“Why?” Pete asked. “It’s not that I mind. But why not just tell her the truth?”

Myka shuddered. These consequences, she had pictured over and over and over. “If I tell her the truth, she’ll try to do something noble. She’ll try to save me somehow, and she’ll end up destroying both of us.”

TBC


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things: first, I have monkeyed with the plot of the 1931 version of “Waterloo Bridge” such that I’m sure it’s unrecognizable, so I apologize to any devotees of that flick; I’ve also moved it from Universal to MGM and recast two of the parts. (I would still like James Whale to have directed it, though.) Second, this goes back and forth a bit in preparation for going forward. Just so you know.

In 1931, Myka saw her first Helena Wells picture. Helena Wells was a name familiar to her, but she had never happened to see her on the screen. After doing so, she didn’t seek Helena Wells out, exactly, but she jumped on opportunities when they arose. She was never quite sure why. She never _enjoyed_ the pictures in exactly the way she felt she should.

“Waterloo Bridge,” this picture was called. In it, Helena Wells played Myra, a London chorus girl. During the war, she meets a soldier on leave and falls for him. Their relationship leads to her losing her job, so she and a fellow performer, Kitty, take an apartment together; unfortunately, work is hard to find. Myra eventually learns that Kitty has been protecting her, supporting them both by working as a prostitute. Myra refuses to let her friend shoulder such responsibility. She joins her in the profession.

Myka took particular note of the way Helena-Wells-as-Myra said, “I will not allow you to bear this alone.”

The soldier returns, and he takes Myra to meet his family. She realizes that she cannot marry him, for his family is far too respectable to accept anyone like the woman she has become. She runs away, back to Kitty. The soldier discovers the truth; he finds her and professes his love. He still wants to marry her, he says, despite everything. She accepts his proposal, but she does so with a fatalistic air. She is right to doubt that they will find happiness together, for soon thereafter, she is killed in an air raid.

Myka saw the movie with a girl, a longtime film fanatic, from her high school.  She had married her high school beau the summer after they graduated, but her husband disliked going to the pictures. He preferred bowling. So on his bowling nights, Myka would accompany her friend to see whatever feature graced the screen of their small theater. “It’s Helena Wells on Wednesday!” her friend had cried. “I’m so excited to see her new picture!”

Myka mentally shrugged, but she agreed to go.

At the movie’s conclusion, her friend sobbed audibly next to her. “He’s going to be so sad,” she whispered to Myka. “Oh, why did she have to die and leave him so sad? What a terrible tragedy!”

Myka was mostly unmoved. The real tragedy, as far as she could see, was that Myra and Kitty, not Myra and the soldier, had lost each other forever. She kept this understanding to herself.

****

In 1940, Myka sits in a studio screening room and watches the remade “Waterloo Bridge,” starring Vivien Leigh as Myra.

The idea of it, some months before, had first made Helena laugh nastily. “First they give her a role I wanted, then one that I in fact _played_! They are certainly being less than subtle in their messages.”

Myka knew where this was likely to end up. She tried to keep the train from picking up speed by saying, “I heard that she’s actually unhappy about it. She didn’t want to do it at first, but she said she would if her husband could be cast with her. They forced Robert Taylor on her instead.” This was a slight massaging of the truth, but Myka thought it might help.

It didn’t.

Now, after having seen the film, Myka thinks she should try again. She will probably fail, but she should try. For it is an excellent picture, for those who like that sort of thing, and it will meet with acclaim.

Myra and Kitty are in no way tragic in this version, and Myka understands that it is the difference between how Helena acts in scenes with other women, and how Vivien Leigh does, that makes her feel this way.

“Don’t see it,” she cautions Helena.

They are in a hotel room again, recently arrived. Neither has made a move toward the other thus far; Myka is standing near the window, and Helena is by the door. There is no cocaine in her system yet, and that is something, though Myka has her doubts about how long that will last. She also has, has been having, glimmers of doubts about what she is doing here, why they are replaying the same argument, reading the same lines.

She knows something will have to change, but she is at a loss as to what that should be. She could issue some ultimatum, but where would that get them? They will simply have to hold on until she can figure out what to change, or until the change, whatever it is, comes unbidden.

For now, though, Helena is asking, as if she doesn’t know the answer, “Why not?”

“Because you’ll hate it. They’ve changed the script completely, because of course they could never get away with what you did.”

“Oh?” Helena says. “What did I do?”

Myka says, “The scenes with you and Kitty, mostly.” She hopes Helena will shift her focus from the studio’s persecution of her to the film itself.

“Ah yes,” Helena says. “Dear Lilyan Tashman. She was quite… aggressive. With the young ladies.”

“Wasn’t she married to Edmund Lowe?”

Now Helena just looks at Myka. It’s reminiscent of an empty Garbo stare.

“Oh, all right,” Myka says. “I know, I know. Marriages don’t mean anything here.”

“Indeed,” Helena says. “She found me both intriguing and awful, I think, because of Garbo. She wanted Garbo all to herself, you see, and I had interfered with that. She was still smoldering with anger over it when we made that picture, despite the fact of its having been over for months, and she made very clear that she wanted to rid herself of that anger by… well. Let us say, by making Garbo similarly jealous.”

“That explains a lot,” Myka says.

“About?”

“I think I… understood things. Somehow. About the two of you. Maybe. I don’t remember it clearly now. But it made me think about things. Possibilities.”

“Oh, yes,” Helena says bitterly, “possibilities. Here we are in a hotel room, unable even to exit the building at the same time. Perhaps in 1931 such things were possible; perhaps in 1931, _I_ was possible. Not anymore, however. Now it’s Vivien Leigh. So what did it matter? Tell me, what did it matter?”

“It mattered to me,” Myka says. “I wouldn’t have come here without movies like that. I mean, if I hadn’t started to get the idea that there truly might be possibilities.”

For once, Helena gentles rather than bristling. “Is that good or bad, I wonder?”

Myka walks across the room and places herself before Helena, an arm’s length away, not touching her, just presenting herself, as if for inspection. “You tell me,” she challenges. “Is it good or bad?”

Helena smiles with something like her old wickedness. She looks Myka up and down, slowly. Then she steps closer, stopping with her body, her hands, her face, some inches away. She brings her hands to Myka’s waist and holds her there, as if they are dancing, as if they must maintain a proper distance. She leans in for a soft, soft kiss. Then she wrenches Myka to her and says, in a voice that Myka finds deliciously rich and low, “To hell with Vivien Leigh.”

For that night, at least, the possibilities Helena shows Myka burn away her doubts.

****

In September of 1936, just after Myka moved into her small house, her mother and sister came to spend a week with her in sunny California. Ostensibly, the visit was to let Tracy see a bit of her sister’s glamorous life before settling down in Colorado Springs. She was to be married in November.

That was the stated purpose. The actual purpose, Myka quickly realized, was to persuade Myka that she herself was similarly in need of both a husband and the domestic skills to support him.

It began when her mother saw her kitchen. “The dishes a woman could make here!” she exclaimed. “You have no idea!”

“It’s just a kitchen,” Myka said.

“Yes, but so modern! You’ve forgotten how the rest of us live. Look at the size of that icebox; you could store enough food for a week.”

Myka wasn’t inclined to store much food in it at all. “I don’t really spend a lot of time here,” she tried to explain. “My workdays are really long.”

“I think every woman’s workday is long,” her mother said. With disapproval.

Myka sighed. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Your sister’s going to understand soon. She’ll have a husband to take care of. And she’s put her mind to learning all kinds of things you never bothered with—she can sew now, and her cooking is really improving. She’s going to make a wonderful home for her husband.”

“Then I guess it’s okay I never bothered with those things,” Myka said. “Since I don’t need to make a wonderful home for any husband.”

“Someday,” said her mother, “you’re going to wish you had done things differently.”

Tracy had historically stayed well away from any disagreements between Myka and their parents. Today, though, much to Myka’s surprise, she decided to take Myka’s side. “But mother, she’s a movie star. Everybody wants to be a movie star, but Myka really is one!”

And their mother said, “I’m sure it’s nice for a while. But don’t waste too much time, Myka. No man will wait forever.”

Myka knew she meant Pete. Pete, who would, in fact, wait forever… although not for Myka. And the one who Myka hoped would wait forever for her? Myka could, just barely, imagine making a home for her, a home with her, but it was so far from possible that the details dissolved when she tried to envision them.

Tracy declared, “Myka doesn’t want a man.”

Myka almost cried out “Don’t!” But she stopped herself just in time; Tracy didn’t know anything about that, about Helena, about that part of Myka’s… disposition.

Tracy went on, “Myka is a career woman.”

Their mother sighed. “She’s going to change her mind at some point, and by that time, it might be too late to find a decent man.”

This made Myka laugh. A decent man? No, much better to have an indecent woman. An indecent woman who didn’t care at all about whether Myka could poach an egg or cook a steak or iron a shirt or make a bed. (“How pointless to make up the bed,” Helena had said on one occasion, “for we’ll be back in it soon enough.” She’d been sitting on the edge of a bed at the time, buttoning up her shirt, and Myka had brazenly pushed between her legs, shoved her onto her back, undone all her diligent work on the buttons, and asked, “Is this soon enough for you?” )

Her mother went on, “Is that funny? What do you think, that that handsome Peter Lattimer doesn’t want a wife?”

“He does want a wife,” Myka said.

She regretted voicing this truth when Tracy’s eyes widened. “He asked you to _marry_ him?”

Myka laughed again.

“And you turned him down?” her mother asked in horror.

Myka hiccupped. “He didn’t, and I didn’t. Pete and I just go out. That’s all. It’s good for our careers. The photographers like us, so we go out.”

Her mother, suspiciously: “And you don’t… stay in?”

And Myka laughed once more. “Not with Pete. Not ever with Pete.” But if she had her way? All the time with Helena. _Days_ at a time. _Weeks_. They would still make movies of course, but they would stay in, in her house or Helena’s, and the beds would stay unmade.

Her mother was not fully placated, but she did speak less on the topic as the week progressed. Myka took them to visit the studio: they met Bill Powell (“So,” he’d said, “are we bringing up another Bering to conquer Hollywood? It’s a dynasty, I tell you!”; Tracy had squealed; he had laughed and taken her to meet Myrna Loy). They had dinners out: Pete came along once, being his charming self, and Tracy decided that if Myka didn’t want to marry him, she certainly did, never mind her fiancé. “I love him. He’s so sweet and funny,” she said to Myka later that night, after their mother had retired.

“He is,” Myka agreed. “I don’t _love_ him, but I do love him, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Tracy said. “Doesn’t he seem a little sad to you, though?”

“He is a little sad,” Myka said. She wanted to be able to share his secret, even to share hers—but she’d been away from home for so long, and Tracy would probably never leave. It wouldn’t be fair for Myka to make her carry such knowledge back with her.

“You seem a little sad too,” Tracy said then. “Why are you sad?”

When had Tracy become so observant?

“You shouldn’t ask any more questions,” Myka told her. “The thing about Hollywood is, you should never ask too many questions.”

****

“Do you think that I am blind?” Helena asks Myka.

It is the evening of their third day in Sedona. Tomorrow afternoon, the interlude ends.

They have gained comfort with each other’s company, so much so that they have begun to bicker. Not argue; just bicker. “How long does it take to put a hat on your head?” Myka asks, to which Helena replies, all the while looking in the mirror and adjusting and readjusting said hat, “Approximately as long as it takes you to perform what _should_ be the simple task of filling the percolator with coffee.”

So Myka thinks that Helena’s question is more of the same.

“No,” she says. “I think sometimes you pretend to be deaf, but I don’t think you’re blind.”

“That is not what I mean,” Helena says. They have just finished eating; Helena has prepared the majority of meals during their stay, what with Myka being unable to even make coffee satisfactorily. Helena has mostly restricted her cuisine to sandwiches and salads, due to the extreme desert heat, but she has promised Myka that someday she will make her her very own lobster thermidor. “There is a secret ingredient,” she assured Myka in a whisper. Myka almost laughed: even the _recipes_ in Hollywood had their secrets.

Myka says now, “Then what did you mean?”

“I can see that you have something on your mind. You have had, the entire time.” Helena says. “I didn’t want to push you, but the hour is late… will you tell me what it is?”

She had wanted to wait… but then again, she hadn’t. She had wanted, really, to stop time and never have to tell Helena at all.

Helena sees her hesitation. “Let me help you,” she says. These few days have altered her demeanor remarkably: she is calm and quiet rather than edgy and restless. She has not, as far as Myka knows, used any drugs at all. She has smoked cigarettes in the morning, but stopped with the coming of afternoon. The surroundings are unusual, after all. They can both inhabit them differently.

“No,” Myka says. “I mean, I don’t think you can help me.” She rises from the sofa they have been sharing and begins to pace.

Minutes pass. “Perhaps we could play twenty questions,” Helena suggests. “Does your worry concern an animal, a vegetable, or a mineral?”

This makes Myka laugh. “Definitely an animal,” she says. “Several animals. We’re all animals here.”

“All right, then, it concerns us. What? You’ve done this marvelous thing for us. What is the matter?” She is _thinking_ now; Myka can see her brow furrow. She loves to watch Helena think; she even loves to see her do her facsimile of it on screen. That is in fact something that gives Myka great pleasure: to watch Helena on the screen and compare what she does there to how Myka sees her in private. To match certain gestures, certain inflections, certain quirks of the lip or eyebrow. The one thing that confounds her is to see Helena in a kiss. Such scenes always make her wonder, almost voyeuristically, what she and Helena might look like in a screen kiss. What it might be like to watch themselves embrace as the music swelled. It could not be that different, she always thinks. And yet it would be completely different too. If those large faces were theirs… obviously, though, that was no more likely to happen than was flying to the moon.

Myka watches Helena’s face, her real face, change as she comes to a realization. “There is a price,” she says, and just like that, her voice, her eyes, have taken on a sheen of desolation. “These days will cost us something. What is the price?”

“Before you get upset,” Myka says, “please hear me out.”

“We shall see,” Helena says.

“No, we shall not see. Tell me that you’ll hear me out.”

“Fine,” Helena says. She reaches for her cigarettes on the side table, lights one, and drags deeply. “Carry on,” she exhales at Myka.

“First, you’re thinking about the situation backwards. There is no price for this. This is a reward for something they need me to do. That I’m going to do. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Which is?” This is another exhale.

Myka coughs a little. “You know I don’t like it when you smoke _at_ me.”

Helena turns her head ostentatiously to the side, and Myka sighs. She has not missed “difficult” Helena in any way, these past days. These past days have reminded her that there was once a time when Helena was not difficult at all—demanding, perhaps, but not difficult. She steels herself for more of the same, however, and says, “A story about Pete and Amanda is about to break. Steve is desperate to keep it under wraps, and you know what the logical solution is.”

“Say it,” Helena tells her.

So she does: “We’re getting married.”

Helena takes one more drag on her cigarette, then stubs it out in the ashtray next to her. She stands up and leaves the room. Myka hears the door to the backyard open and close.

Myka is now standing in front of an empty sofa. Delicate curls of smoke rise from the ashtray as she watches one ember on the cigarette glow, glow, then fade.

TBC


	11. Chapter 11

Myka knows she must be very careful now.

She stands up straight, stretching her spine to its fullest length. She lets herself feel her height, her strength; she allows that to push her to the backyard to finish what she started.

Helena is standing in the waning evening light. Squinting at the horizon into the sun. The rays are still punishing, and they create shadows in the tiny wrinkles that have begun to form at the corners of her eyes, between her brows, around her mouth. These are just ripples; they disappear when her face moves. But they are indications of what is to come, and Myka has thought about this less than she should: Helena is thirty-five.

Myka goes to Helena and wraps her arms around her from behind: one arm around her waist, one around her shoulders and neck. Helena hates being held like this; she complains that it makes her feel trapped. But Myka wants to cage her. She wants Helena to understand that she will not be permitted to run away.

She says into Helena’s ear, “You know it doesn’t change anything. You know it doesn’t _mean_ anything.”

“It changes everything,” Helena says. “It means everything.”

“How? Why?”

“Because it’s _you_.” Helena leans her head down, against the arm at her throat.

Myka had braced herself for anger. She does not know what to do with this yielding, defeated sadness. She thinks she would actually prefer anger: an enraged Helena is an energized Helena, and Myka could have taken from that, could have pushed back against that.

Instead, Helena is slumping in her arms, almost collapsing. Myka is all that is keeping her upright.

“Don’t you dare leave me,” Myka says, again in her ear. “Don’t you dare break down. I can’t do this without you.”

“Then I’ll leave you so that you can’t,” Helena says to the ground toward which she is sagging.

“I have to.”

“Why you? Why must it be you?” She’s begging the ground now, begging the red Arizona dirt. Myka thinks that if she let go, Helena would just curl up in that dirt, make herself smaller and smaller, and disappear.

“You know that’s a silly question,” Myka tells her. She is crooning into Helena’s ear now; everything she says, she is almost singing, low and slow. Because she cannot let Helena break. “No one else is believable… you know that. You know what people have been led to think. For years now Pete and I have been seen together. Longer even than you and I.”

“You and I have never been seen together. Never.”

“I know. I know. But think, Helena, think: now we could be. Think how this helps us, too.”

“No!” Helena wrenches away. She stumbles, but she doesn’t fall; she turns to face Myka, and she is crying. “It doesn’t help at all. To be seen together? You would have to learn to look at me as if I am nothing to you. Steve still won’t let you say my name, I know he won’t, because you have not learned to do even that without love. How does this help us if it makes you learn those things? I don’t want you to learn those things. I never want you to learn those things.”

“They won’t see those things. If I’m married to Pete, no one will see those things. And if they see them, they won’t understand them. Please, Helena. Please, you have to look at this the right way.”

“The right way? What is the right way? I see only one way, and I see only one thing: you living with Pete Lattimer.”

“Do you for one minute think I will be doing anything with him other than… I don’t know, listening to the radio?”

“He will be your _husband_. He will be entitled to your time.”

“He doesn’t want my time.”

“But he will have it nevertheless. All the time that you and I never get to share, he will get it instead. Mornings, evenings, meals, leisure. All the things I want.”

“Amanda may want that with him. I don’t.”

Helena swipes across her face with her sleeve. It is a wildly out-of-character, inelegant gesture. “Perhaps I should seek Amanda out,” she says thickly. “She and I will certainly have something in common.”

Myka sees that she is trying to shake it off, trying to jest herself back to something like normal. Myka tries to help her along:  “There’s another part to the reward,” she says.

Helena huffs. “Four days in some other godforsaken desert?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Myka says, as lightly as she can, “you haven’t enjoyed these days here? Nothing _pleasant_ has happened here?”

This was clearly the wrong thing to say; Helena’s eyes fill again. “These days here,” she chokes. “I had nearly _forgotten_ that I want your time. How much I want every moment of your time. And now you’ve reminded me so clearly of how little of it I will ever get to have. So whatever was pleasant? Whatever I enjoyed? Destroyed now. Gone.”

She doesn’t mean it—she is lashing out now in a very Helena way, fatalism forward—but it still stings. “Listen to me,” Myka says. “I love you. But maybe even more than that, I need you. I need you in so many ways, and I will not let you take this as an opportunity, as an _excuse_ , to let me down.”

This was the right thing to say, Myka sees, because now Helena is stuck. Now the noble thing to do _isn’t_ the grand gesture; it’s staying and working and, yes, suffering, but suffering far less ostentatiously than she is usually inclined to do. Myka watches through several moments as Helena’s demeanor changes from surprised to calculating to sullen to—suddenly—suddenly and simply—accepting.

“I need you too,” Helena says. “Obviously.”

“You don’t always make it obvious.”

And now Helena truly gives in. “I should.” She moves closer to Myka. “I will.”

She is moving tentatively, as if she does not fully believe Myka wants her. And Myka laughs, takes her by the hand, tugs her body closer. “You’d better. Because otherwise? I’ll tell Mrs. Frederic I’ve changed my mind about the other part of our reward.”

“What is it?” Helena’s curious now, focused and curious.

Myka can barely keep her voice from breaking; _thankgodthankgodthankgod_ is beating in her brain. “Oh, now you want to know?” she teases.

Helena leans her head on Myka’s shoulder, right next to her neck. Myka can feel Helena’s eyelashes as she blinks. “Yes,” she sighs. “I want to know.”

“We’re making a movie together. After we’ve finished shooting the ones we’re on now.” Now Myka’s the curious one: how will Helena react?

It takes only a second for her to feel Helena’s lips curling into a smile, right under her ear. “Really?” she asks.

“Really. But I’m not playing your maid in this one,” she warns. “And I demanded more than seven lines.”

“I always knew you were trying to steal my crown,” Helena says.

“Your crown, your heart… one of those. I get them confused.”

“Not to worry,” Helena says grandly, or as grandly as she can, curled as she is against Myka’s side. “Everything I have is yours. Everything I _am_.”

“Are you?” Myka asks, half amused, half dazed.

“Yes. And you… are you mine?” She swings around now to stand in front of Myka.

Myka realizes that the sun has now set fully. The temperature has begun to drop, and she can feel it, now that Helena’s warm body is no longer next to hers.

She shivers a little. She wants that body back again. “Always.”

“I have doubts,” Helena admits. “I don’t doubt _you_ , but I have doubts.”

Myka pulls Helena close and kisses her; now she shivers for a different reason. “Come on then. Take me to bed and reassure yourself.”

****

Helena has never liked to leave marks; she does not stake her claim that way. But Myka can feel her say, with every drive of her fingers, every stroke of her tongue, every push of her flesh against Myka’s: “you are mine.”

And so Myka says back, with every gasp, every sigh, every cry and whimper of pleasure: “I am yours.”

****

Myka leaves Sedona with a sense of relief at having managed to defuse, for the time being at least, an extremely dangerous situation.

But Myka also leaves Sedona knowing that she has lied to Helena. That knowledge is new, it is wrong, and it is a sliver of ice in her heart.

****

Things happen very quickly once they return home. Steve thinks it will be best for Myka and Pete to be married in California rather than in Nevada, where there is no blood test and no wait. “It has to look like you planned it,” he says. “Nevada weddings seem too hasty.”

He has talked to Louella Parsons; he has told her the “truth” about Myka and Pete. He makes it seem as if they, like so many other stars, were secretly living together. In recent years, other couples have been forced to wed: Gable and Lombard, Taylor and Stanwyck. Steve tells Louella that Myka and Pete escaped notice then only because Pete was not as big a star as the others. Such scandals no longer carry as much weight, so whatever Louella has heard about Myka? It must have come from someone with a lofty standard of morality, trying to shock and shame her so dramatically as to force Pete to make an honest woman of her.

Unfortunately, Steve tells Myka, Louella will not give him any information about where the story came from.

Myka just shrugs. What’s one more sword hanging over her head?

****

The three days of waiting, between the issuance of the marriage license and the ceremony itself, are by far the strangest of Myka’s life.

Steve, who is organizing the wedding, asks her if she wants anything in particular.

“Not to have it,” she says.

“Except that,” he sighs at her.

The idea, he explains, is that they should appear to not want to draw attention to it. He and his girlfriend Claudia, rather than any stars from the studio, will be their witnesses. That way any pictures that “happen” to be taken of the event will feature only Pete and Myka, will focus on their “quiet, intimate” courthouse wedding.

Small and private seems more real. And what seems real is all that matters.

It seems real to Myka’s parents when she telephones them. A long-distance telephone call is such an extravagance that it confirms the sincerity of her words. Her mother is beside herself with joy. Myka tells them that they can visit very soon, but that the wedding will not be much of an event. Not worth the train trip.

In truth, she could not bear to have them witness it.

She makes one more call immediately: to Tracy. She knows her mother will be raving to Tracy soon enough, and she wants to somehow change the way her sister receives that. She needs someone in her family to be… tempered.

Tracy is, to say the least, surprised to receive a call from Myka.

“I’m marrying Pete,” Myka says as soon as they exchange hellos.

“Why?” Tracy asks.

“Because I am.”

“You didn’t wake up one day and magically find yourself in love with him,” Tracy says. “What’s happened?”

Myka says, “I told you a long time ago: in Hollywood, you shouldn’t ask too many questions.” But she wants to say something else. She wants to tell her everything, but she settles for: “I’m not in love with him. I won’t ever be in love with him. Please don’t tell Mother.”

“I know I’m not supposed to ask questions, but… you’re not pregnant, are you?”

At this, Myka laughs. “I won’t ever be pregnant, either. You can take that to the bank.”

“Okay,” Tracy tells her. “But I like Pete. I like you, too, even though I never see you. I hope that your… whatever this is, I hope it works out like it’s supposed to.”

Myka thinks Tracy would like Helena.

She says as much to Helena, with whom she spends a portion of the night before her wedding.

“More fool she,” Helena says.

“Well, I more than like you.”

“Well, even more fool you,” Helena responds.

Later, Helena also says, just once: “Please don’t do this.”

Myka says, “I have to do this.”

“Then do one other thing. For me,” Helena says.

The light in their hotel room is on. They are reassembling themselves. Myka’s dress fastens up the back, and she is struggling with it. “I will,” Myka says, “if you’ll help me with these buttons.”

Helena moves behind her. Myka was afraid her fingers, now, would burn; instead they soothe. Helena says, each word a warm breath against Myka’s back, “Think of me. It’s selfish, I know, but—please think of me.”

She puts her arms around Myka. Leans against her, her mouth between Myka’s shoulderblades. Myka could carry her this way, could just stoop down and take all of Helena’s slight weight onto her back.

“I will,” she says.

****

Myka has met Steve’s girlfriend in passing, but they have exchanged few words.

“Congratulations?” Claudia says when she and Steve join Pete and Myka at the courthouse.

Myka looks a question at Steve.

“It’s okay,” Steve says. “She knows.”

“It’s a strange day,” Myka says.

Pete agrees.

He spent part of last night with Amanda.

From that point, Myka tries to let the day blur.

“Do you, Myka Ophelia Bering…”

“I do,” Myka says. She keeps her promise. She thinks of Helena.

“She looks like she’s really in love,” she hears Claudia whisper to Steve.

“She is,” Steve whispers back.

****

Photo caption in _Photoplay_ magazine, October 1941:

“After an extremely long engagement, Myka Bering and Peter Lattimer have finally made it official! Here’s the happy couple outside the courthouse, ready to head off to sunny Mexico for their honeymoon!”

****

For several weeks, stasis.

It has been determined that Pete and Myka will live in Myka’s house until one of Steve’s friends in real estate can find them something to move to, something that will be suitable for a “newlyweds” photo shoot. On the infrequent occasions when they find themselves in the house at the same time, they do, in fact, listen to the radio. They play cards. They talk about work. They agree that they make generally good housemates.

Myka’s current picture is soon to wrap; Helena’s will take a bit longer. The two of them meet as they always have—more often, now, than in the preceding months. Sedona has for now trumped the marriage.

Myka allows herself to relax slightly.

On December 7, she realizes how foolish that was.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 11 tumblr tags: the thing is, when I originally plotted out this story, I thought Helena would be angry, and that the backyard scene would be ablaze with that, but then I got to it and realized I was wrong, however: feel free to let me know if you disagree


	12. Chapter 12

Myka and Pete are eating a late dinner together; both had plans elsewhere, but both sets of plans fell through. So they are sitting in the dining room, eating vegetable soup and crackers.

“We should have gone out,” Myka says. “I don’t even like soup.”

Pete says, “It’s too late to go out. For me anyway; I’m tired. And if you don’t like soup, you should learn to cook. Or I should. Because Amanda can, and H.G. can, and that’s all fine when we’re someplace else, but somebody in this marriage should know how to cook something other than soup and toast.”

“Neither of those is even cooking. Just heating.”

Pete says, after a pause, “I think toast involves cooking.”

“I think you don’t know what cooking actually is.” Myka eats a cracker. “I don’t like crackers either. Maybe I’ll make some toast.”

“I joined the Army.”

Myka doesn’t know what to say in response to that.

“This afternoon. I went and volunteered. Better that than get drafted.”

“Did you tell them at the studio?”

Pete slurps some soup. “Nobody really cared. They can get anybody for my kind of pictures. That new producer, Mr. Schary, he doesn’t even know me… probably thinks it’s good riddance.”

“That’s not true,” Myka says.

“Well, anyway, I’ll be going to training soon. Will you be okay?”

“Me? I’ll be fine. Will Amanda be okay?”

“I don’t know how she’ll feel about it. I was planning on telling her tonight, but… here we are instead. I figured you’d be a good test run.”

“I would break it to her a little more gently,” Myka says.

“I’m not real good at that,” Pete says.

****

The next day, Myka is in Steve’s office, waiting. They are to talk about how to handle Pete’s absence.

Steve arrives, but he is not alone: Claudia follows him in. She smiles at Myka.

“Hi,” Myka says. “I haven’t seen you since the wedding. How’s editing?”

Steve says, “Interesting you should ask. She’s not in editing anymore.”

“Really?” Myka asks. “Where are you now?”

Claudia smiles wider. “Publicity,” she says.

“And you seem happy about it, so that’s great,” Myka tells her. “Congratulations. Are you going to work with Steve?”

“Actually, she’s going to work _as_ me.”

“I’m not sure I get that,” Myka says.

“I joined the Army.”

It isn’t surprising that everyone’s joining the Army—because _everyone_ is joining the Army. Myka just expected it to take longer than six weeks for everyone she knows to leave.

Claudia says, “So you’re my responsibility now.”

She looks maybe eighteen years old… but then, so did Steve. “Okay,” Myka says. “I’ll try not to make your life as hard as I made his.”

“You didn’t,” Steve protests.

Myka gives him her own version of the Garbo blank stare. It isn’t very blank, and it isn’t much of a stare, but it gets her point across.

“Okay,” he concedes. “You really did. You and H.G., I should say, really did. Oh! Which reminds me! You’ll hear this later today, but I’ll go ahead and tell you: they changed their minds about what to put the two of you in.”

Their shared picture was intended to be a melodrama, one in which Myka’s husband would leave her for Helena’s shady older woman. Helena had laughed and laughed at this plotline. “Perhaps I’ll play it as if I’m undecided as to which one of you to steal from the other,” she’d said. Myka was fine with her playing the part any way she wanted to; all that mattered was that she was in a good mood about it.

Which a new picture might threaten. “So what’s the new picture?” Myka asks.

“You want to do the honors?” Steve asks Claudia.

They are really very sweet together. Myka counts back… they have been “dating” for four years now? Almost five?

Claudia practically starts bouncing. “I think you’ll like it! They want to make hay with the idea of the war, with all the men leaving for training and to go overseas—so it’s you and H.G. and a couple other women, and your husbands leave, and you all have to, I guess, pull together to make ends meet. Mr. Mayer wants Hedy Lamarr in it too. Big budget! Lots of great publicity possibilities, too. You know, you’ve got the personal experience of Pete leaving, and you can get to be really good friends with H.G. and Hedy… ”

“Really good friends…” Myka says. “Really?”

“I think it’s safe,” Steve tells her. “I think having a husband in the Army is going to help you out a lot.”

Myka feels terrible for Pete, but… inside, she is bouncing almost as much as Claudia.

****

Myka is drowsing against Helena’s shoulder, exhausted after a long day. Helena is clearly tired too, for she isn’t talking, just brushing her fingers slowly through Myka’s hair. They don’t have much time; they’ve already been here for an hour, and Helena will have to go home to see to Charles soon… Myka had never imagined that posing for pictures all day could drain one’s energy like this, but it can, so they are both lying on a hotel bed, fully clothed.

“Your dress will wrinkle,” Helena eventually whispers.

“Too late,” Myka mumbles back. “I’m not leaving till morning anyway. I’ll go early enough that no one will see me.”

“You’re staying?” Helena shifts her shoulder a little. “Why?”

“Pete’s leaving tomorrow, and he and Amanda couldn’t find anywhere to meet. So they’re at the house… I wanted to give them some privacy. I feel so bad for them.”

“Hm,” Helena says. “You should feel bad for me too—having to go home and think about the fact that you’ll be right here all night.”

“You’ll see me tomorrow,” Myka reminds her. Their script meetings for the new picture are due to begin, and they will be able to see each other every day. Every day for at least two months, and no one will think a thing of it. Christmas is past, but this more than outshines every present Myka received. Ever. “And lots of tomorrows after that.”

“So I will,” Helena says. She pushes her lips gently against Myka’s forehead. They lie quietly again.

“I don’t know what to think of the war,” Myka says after a while. “It’s wrong to be glad it’s happening. I know it is, and that’s not what I’m glad about. I must be a monster, though, because I think I might die from happiness.”

“I know,” Helena says. “I feel the same way.”

They lie together for half an hour more.

****

Myka lets herself into her house at 6 a.m.

She is surprised to find a beautiful blond woman in her kitchen, making coffee—far more efficiently than Myka has ever been able to do.

“Good morning?” Myka ventures.

The blond woman—she has wide-set, almond eyes—smiles. “Myka,” she says. “I’m glad we’re meeting. Finally.”

“Amanda,” Myka says.

“Pete will be down in a minute. He must have thought you’d be lazy this morning.”

“I would have, but—”

“Let me guess,” Amanda says. “She couldn’t stay. The night, I mean.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

Myka laughs. “Not more than I am.”

Amanda—she’s so beautiful—laughs back. “I understand.” She gestures toward the percolator. “Want some coffee? I thought about making breakfast, but you and Pete don’t have any food.”

“God, I know,” Myka groans. “We eat soup. And Spam sometimes. It’s awful.”

“Will you be all right? Without him, I mean?”

“I’ll be fine,” Myka assures her. “Will you?”

“I have no idea. It’s been years. Since.”

“What about your husband?” Myka asks. She still has no idea who Amanda’s husband is.

“That’s… not something I can talk about.” Amanda looks down at the percolator. Looks back up at Myka.

“That’s fine,” Myka tells her. “But if there’s anything I can do, _please_ tell me. Call me here,” she says. She makes a quick decision:  “Or call the studio. Ask for Claudia Donovan, tell her you know me and Pete. She’ll know what to do, okay? I don’t want you to feel like… like you can’t. Okay?”

“Okay,” Amanda says. She isn’t crying. Myka thinks she would not cry—probably did not cry, even years ago.

Pete crashes into the kitchen, as he does, then screeches to a halt. “Whoops,” he says. “Sorry, Amanda, Mykes, everybody, I didn’t want to make this into—”

“It’s all right,” Amanda says.  
  
“It is,” Myka agrees. “We’re fine. I’m glad we finally got to meet. I wish it were… better.”

“Me too,” Amanda says.

“I’ll just go get ready for work,” Myka says.

She is barely out of the room; she can _feel_ them embracing, feel their _goodbye_ , behind her. She thinks back on her time with Helena, her time that was, for once, not a goodbye.

****

And the days that follow are everything they should not be: they are perfect. They are jewels of joy.  She and Helena speak with each other, _joke_ with each other, in script reads, on set when filming begins, on photo shoots.

Hedy Lamarr, their costar, is a joy as well: she is smart and funny and fits in perfectly with this fantasy world they are pretending is the truth. She discerns immediately their situation: “For what is the point of being European,” she says in her delightful Hungarian accent, “if I cannot _understand_ certain things?” And she smiles widely at Myka and Helena. “Besides, there is George.”

She means George Antheil, the composer. He is her almost constant companion—“But not like you think,” she says. “We are _working_. It may help the war. May not. We will see.” In any event, George, who now has a wife and child, “was not always so _conventional_. So ladies, you are as you are.” She waves her Hedy Lamarr hands at them, and that is that. They are beatified.

****

“I might be in love with her,” Myka says to Helena. They are in Myka’s house for the first time in months. “I mean Hedy. Just a little.”

Helena laughs. “I might, as well,” she says.

“Just… someone who really doesn’t care. Who we’re around all the time, who really doesn’t care.”

“Well, there are others who wouldn’t,” Helena points out. “We haven’t been around them. Together. All the time.”

“If we could make movies together all the time,” Myka says. “If we could just have this _excuse_.”

“Enjoy it for now,” Helena tells her. “Let us enjoy it while we can.”

“I want to enjoy it right now,” Myka tells her. “Right now. Right now. Right now.” She is happy; she is guilty; she is overcome with love; she is greedy. She knows this cannot last. It is too much; she feels like she has dipped into Helena’s cocaine now, the cocaine that has become only occasional, the cocaine that enhances rather than masking, hiding, eradicating. But she doesn’t care, and she wonders if this is how Helena used to feel, when she would take Myka so ferociously… now Myka is the wilder one, but Helena certainly doesn’t seem to mind.

They are in Myka’s house, they are everywhere in Myka’s house, over and over again, and Helena certainly does not seem to mind.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 12 tumblr tags: man I love me some Hedy Lamarr, and if you don't then you should stop using your cell phone, because she made that possible, and George Antheil, Ballet Mécanique!, seriously Hedy is a superheroine in real life, and she will be in this narrative too


	13. Chapter 13

During one of Myka’s earliest films, she was to be shot in close-up. She was to look up, surprised to catch a glimpse of a certain someone. She practiced several times, until she was sure she was looking up with the appropriate measure of naturally occurring astonishment.

They ran through the take once. When it came time for Myka to raise her head, the director told her, “Look down.”

He was exactly right: once you’ve looked down…

Myka learned very quickly that making movies—making anything meant to seem real—goes against the intuition. Doing the thing itself is so rarely the point. You do what comes before, what comes after. It takes hours to capture five seconds; five seconds can stand in for years. Someone you met an hour ago, you kiss as the love of your life. Your lover of almost eight years? You meet her this morning, for the first time.

****

Myka and Helena’s first scene together since 1934:

INT.  BEDROOM – DAY

HELENA is showing the room, a well-appointed spare bedroom, to MYKA, who holds a folded newspaper.

      MYKA

It’s very nice. Just as you said in the ad.

     HELENA

Thank you. We do have another, but it’s smaller. You’re the first to look.

     MYKA

Then I feel bad for the next person, because I’ll take it.

     HELENA (surprised)

You will?

     MYKA

I told you. Now that my husband’s gone overseas, our apartment’s just too expensive. This is perfect. I mean, as long as it isn’t too expensive.

     HELENA

We must all pull together in times like these. I’m sure we can work something out.

****

In bed together, much later that night, Myka says, “ ‘I’m sure we can work something out’? You said that as if it were a terrible pick-up line.”

Helena says, “It seems to have worked reasonably well on you. After all, here you are.”

****

Helena raises her glass to Myka’s. She leans up and whispers in Myka’s ear, “I love you.” They are drinking Champagne at the party following the premiere of “On the Home Front.” They have both had the tiniest bit too much. They are standing very close to each other.

Myka feels as she always does when Helena says those words: like repeating them back to Helena. So she leans down and whispers them too. It is fine. They are friends now—even _Photoplay_ says so—and friends can tell each other things in confidence. She hears Steve in the back of her mind saying “whatever you do, don’t touch her—don’t ever touch her.” Myka defiantly reaches up with her free hand and places an artfully stray lock of hair behind Helena’s ear.

From somewhere in the vicinity, she hears Hedy, sounding oddly like that internal-Steve voice, saying “Ladies, you may wish to stand apart.”

“Why?” Myka asks. She does understand the problem that all the Steves have with her touching Helena; she’s now intoxicated with the idea of keeping her hand near Helena’s face, just being able to do that again and again…

“Because of the masked gentleman who is approaching as if he has _leapt his track_.”

Myka looks. And Hedy is not wrong: steaming toward them is a man in half of a face mask, and it takes Myka half of a second to process the sight, because she has not seen him in, quite literally, years—

“Charles,” Helena says. She moves even closer to Myka, as if to protect her.

“Helena,” Charles says back at her.

“Hedy darling,” Helena says, as calmly as can be, “this is my brother, Charles.”

Hedy extends her hand to him. “A brother. How delightful!”

And Charles, bizarrely, has manners: he takes her hand and kisses it, as well as he can with the mask partially in the way. “Miss Lamarr,” he says.

Myka feels like she’s watching a twisted version of “Phantom of the Opera.” She’s heard that a new one is in the works over at Universal… they should cast Charles. Maybe if he were busy making movies, he’d leave Helena—and by extension Myka—alone… and not look at them with the contempt he’s showing, now that he’s turned his attention back to them from Hedy.

Myka begins to understand, however, that they actually have a bigger problem than Charles himself: his determined advance has caught other people’s attention. And one of the people whose attention is now on Myka and Helena is Louella Parsons.

And Louella looks sideways at the two of them, standing as they are together. They are standing so close that Myka can barely see a way to even angle her body more appropriately. Louella glances at Charles’s face; she must see the distortion of its unhidden side. Something that is uncomfortably close to realization crosses her features, and Myka’s heart begins to pick up speed.

Hedy sees all of this too—Myka senses her head swiveling—and then she moves, with the smooth grace of a trained dancer executing the most complicated of steps, to separate Myka and Helena and stand between them.

Louella says, as she stalks toward them all, “Captain Wells, how delightful to see you again.” She looks at Myka and Helena—now Myka, Hedy, and Helena—again. “Do you recall that conversation you and I had last year regarding the lovely Miss Bering?”

“Of course I do,” Charles snaps.

“And you must know that dear Myka here married soon after that.”

“I know that as well. A fortunate event.”

“Indeed. I wonder…” Louella begins. “I wonder if there might have been more to that story than you perhaps wished to tell me at that time. That you perhaps refrained from telling me, because it involved your sister a bit more… intimately. Than you suggested was the case.”

At this, Hedy lets out an enormous laugh. “My darling Louella! I have intuited what you are insinuating, and you simply _must_ develop a better _sense_ about these things! I can’t imagine what Captain Wells told you, but _Myka_? This wholesome _American_? She has no idea that such associations _exist_! If H.G. is having an affair with _anyone_ of the female persuasion, it is _obviously…_ me! Just look at me! Now come, George wants to talk to you. He’s quite anxious to tell you all about Stravinsky. They’re friends again, you know.”

Hedy steps forward, forcing Louella to take a step back. Then she loops her arm together with Louella’s and pulls her away. She looks back over her shoulder and winks.

“What just happened?” Myka asks.

Helena says, “I believe Hedy and I have begun an affair?”

“She _is_ beautiful,” Myka says. “You could do worse.” She knows it’s a foolish thing to say; she knows that somehow, she must wade through her relief about Louella in order to focus on Charles, because he… he’s the one?

Charles snarls, “Stop making jokes!”

“All right,” Helena says, suddenly all predator. “Then tell me what she was talking about. Tell me this second.”

Charles says nothing.

Helena says, “We’ll start slowly, then. Tell me, first, _why are you here_?”

“Those billboards,” Charles says.

Myka is baffled; she can see that Helena is too.

“The ones that advertise this film,” Charles says. “Showing the two of you… suggesting that it is somehow _not perverse_ for you to be embracing…”

“Good lord,” Helena says. “We aren’t _embracing_. She’s just got the news that her husband has died, and I am holding her to keep her from collapsing. I am fairly certain that that is in fact _not perverse_. And in any case, how could you possibly leap from that to… anything else? I’d barely seen Myka before we were cast in this picture.”

Myka involuntarily breathes in heavily. Charles hears; Charles sees. He says, “Of course. And that’s why you keep that picture of her in your night table? Because you had become such strangers to each other? Oh no, I understood that for what it was: evidence. Even if I believed, at first, that she had denied you, it was abundantly clear that you continued to consider her important.” He turns to Myka. “The story about _you_ was meant to hurt _her_.” He points at Helena.

Helena asks, “You were going through my things? You found the picture?” She is a step behind, but Myka knows she will catch up in a minute. She has no idea how she is going to make any part of this right.

“You certainly didn’t hide it well. Pervert.”

Myka asks Helena, “What picture is he talking about?”

Helena, improbably, blushes. “It was one from a shoot you did a very long time ago. A very very long time ago. I just… well, it seems pointless to deny it now: I was sentimental about it. I would look at it.”

“Yes,” Charles says. “You would. You are not nearly as opaque as you wish to believe, Helena, and you now and again consume great quantities of substances that, I assure you, make you quite transparent indeed.”

They really do sound almost exactly alike. They are aging to look more alike as well. Myka is too afraid to pay attention to anything other than these physical basics.

“Transparent as I may be, what has that to do with Myka?”

“I told you. There was to be a story about her proclivities. It was to ruin her.”

“But why not simply ruin _me_?” Helena is obviously stumped by this; she’s fidgeting, touching her hair, tucking and untucking and retucking that one lock.

Myka says, “I can answer that one. That’s easy. Ruining you ruins his meal ticket, _plus_ it doesn’t hurt you nearly as much. I think we both know that, don’t we, Charles? She can deal with any pain that’s hers. She can deal with that all on her own. Just like you can.”

Charles narrows his eye at her. “You aren’t the same girl you were.”

“No,” Myka says. “I’m absolutely not.”

“The outcome pleased me,” Charles tells Myka. “I believed your being married would wound her even more. But clearly, from what I just saw, you think nothing of your marriage. And it is also clear that she keeps that picture not out of any sense of _nostalgia_ , but because this never stopped. Your husband is gone, fighting as men must, and here you are, as much of an invert as my sister. Why can’t either of you be normal?”

“Normal,” Helena says. “Have you looked at what we do? Have you seen this place in which we live? Nothing is normal here, Charles. In truth, I cannot imagine what _normal_ could possibly mean: there you were, when I was twelve, and though you have never believed it, you became normal to me. Since then, nothing has seemed normal _or_ abnormal. Everything simply _is_. I may wish it otherwise, but it _is_.”

“And yet you do not want it to end,” Charles accuses.

“No,” Helena says. “I don’t. This is my world. I belong here—here and nowhere else.”

“Then you will understand when I tell you that if you do not tell this woman to cleave to her husband alone, I will see that your stay in this world, and her stay, come to an end. This very night. I think Miss Parsons will be quite likely to believe anything I tell her.”

“Hedy notwithstanding, she already half-believes it,” Helena says, as if she is simply musing over the point. “Of both of us.”

“All the more reason to put a stop to _this_.” Charles points at Myka.

Myka says, as forcefully as she can do in an undertone, “This is not your decision!”

And Helena says, “No. But it is mine.” She takes Charles by the arm.

Just like that, they are gone.

How long did the confrontation last? Ten minutes?

She touched Helena in public. Steve had warned her, over and over again, never to do that. Never. “I don’t care if she’s about to be hit by a car,” he’d said once. “ _You_ don’t knock her out of the way.”

****

Myka goes to see Claudia the next day. Claudia is sitting in Steve’s chair, and Myka tells her everything, from beginning to end.

Then she asks, “So what do I do?”

Claudia, fairly understandably, is gaping at her.

“I don’t know what to do,” Myka says.  
  
“Well, geez, me neither!” Claudia exclaims. “Steve didn’t know about the Charles part, where he told Louella? Nothing about the Charles part?”

“Nothing,” Myka says.

“Okay. Okay. I have some ideas about that, but…”

“But what?”

“Well, it’s like you want me to tell you what to do about H.G.”

“I do want you to tell me what to do about Helena. I want _somebody_ to tell me what to do.”

“I’m not your head-shrinker,” Claudia says. “I’ll figure out how to handle Louella, don’t you worry about that. Maybe H.G. and Hedy _are_ having a crazy affair. That they aren’t having, that we can all have a good ‘Europeans and how we don’t understand them’ laugh at. H.G. does like to wear those trousers… some photos, her and the irresistible Hedy Lamarr…”

“Don’t bring Hedy into this. She was just doing us a favor. A huge favor.”

Claudia says, “Louella won’t care, as long as she gets something interesting. And the beauty of it is, no one will believe it. I mean, Hedy! And men! So we’re gold.”

Myka does not feel gold. She feels sick.

****

Two nights later, Myka receives a telephone call at home.

Helena says, “I wanted to let you know.”

“Where are you?” Myka demands. Myka has not laid eyes on her, they have not spoken one word, since the party.

“At my house,” Helena says. “At my house.”

Something is clearly wrong.

“What are you doing?” Myka asks.

“Hah,” Helena says. “What am I doing. A clever question. So clever.”  
  
“What’s clever about it?”

“Tell them. Make sure Steve… no, Claudia now… tells them. Exactly what I am doing. Exactly what I have always done. I want it in the papers.”

“What?”

“You lied to me.”

“To keep from hurting you more,” Myka says. “To keep you from doing something foolish. To save us.”

“You lied to me.”

“You would have lied to me,” Myka tells her. “You would have.”

“But I did not. The fact is, I never lied to you. Never. Did I do terrible things? Yes. But I never lied. Never lied.”

She sounds exhausted. Gone. “What are you doing?” Myka asks again.

“Make the studio tell them,” Helena says.

“Tell who? Tell them what?”

“I said I would protect you. Claudia can say whatever keeps you most clearly out of it, whatever focuses Louella’s attention, all their attention, on me. My attempts to dull the pain—of my perversion. How I tried to seduce young girls. Hint about Garbo… she won’t care. And that other young girl… the one Artie begrudged me… I can’t even remember her name, she left the studio, got married… as they all do… as you all do…”

“Helena, stop it. Yes, I lied to you! All right! I did that!”

“And if about that…” Helena says.

If she would just listen to _reason_ —but this is Helena. And she is right. She is right. Myka lied.

“That is the _only_ thing,” Myka says. “Will you please just—”

“No,” Helena says.

The line goes dead.

TBC


	14. Chapter 14

Myka sits in her car and waits.

She is up the street from Helena’s house. She can see the front door. She can see the three police cars and two ambulances. She watches their lights flash.

She called them.

She called them, then got in the car and drove here. To wait.

As the flashes of light, so too flashes of Helena: completely undone, in the back of her limousine. Smiling and soft in a chesterfield chair. Teasing, winking. Sobbing. Triumphant over a picture’s success; furious at a less than rave review. Sated, sleeping.

So many Helenas. The drunken Romeo on Myka’s doorstep. The sibling bound so tightly to her brother. The wild young lover of Greta Garbo. The aging, threatened star. The noble protector of her first love. The assured seducer of a girl just arrived in Hollywood.

The love of Myka’s life.

Myka is waiting to see how the love of her life will be brought out of that house: on a stretcher or in a bag.

Myka entered a beauty contest in 1933 because it was something different, because she could not see a real future for herself beyond a vast stretch of days, each exactly like the one before it. Because the words “Hollywood talent scout” were in the advertisement, and Hollywood at least gave Myka things to think about. Because movies, books, the radio… they all took her to other places.

Not because she dreamed of finding the love of her life.

All she did was watch a woman smoke a cigarette. Then she watched that same woman smoke more cigarettes, watched her drink, watched her take drugs. Watched her do those things well and poorly, for good reasons and bad.

Watched her do the same things over and over. They have kept doing the same things, both of them, over and over, loving, hiding, fighting. Yet not the same at all, for the years pass, and the words they say mean more, and all of it digs deeper, the secrets, the fights, the love. Myka is stronger; Helena is weaker. Or is it the other way around?

She sees the front door open. She does not feel strong; she does not feel weak. She doesn’t feel love or anger. She doesn’t feel anything. She is waiting, and waiting is not feeling.

It’s a stretcher.

And the figure on the stretcher is moving. Not well, not normally, but moving. Myka can tell. The figure is thrashing, tossing a mane of long, black hair.

Myka called Claudia, too, right after she called the police and the hospital, so that someone from the studio would go to the hospital. So that if Helena were taken to the hospital, someone would be able to tell Myka what happened, if anything happened. If there was a result. Whether it was good or bad.

It is actually Pete’s car that she is driving. She starts Pete’s car and drives home through the night, to wait again, through the night.

****

Helena is in the hospital for three weeks. At the studio, Myka receives bulletins from Claudia every day: today she sat up; today she asked for a meal; today she slept for three hours; today she said she was bored.

On no day does she ask for Myka.

At the studio, Myka receives something else: comfort. Everyone, it seems, knows what happened to Helena—of course they know that; Claudia has seen to it that the papers reported her “exhaustion,” but everyone knows what that is code for. But what everyone also knows is what it means to Myka that this has happened.

Bill Powell comes to her the day after it happens. He says, “Let’s go to dinner.” When Myka says she couldn’t possibly go out, he says, “Then you’re coming to my house.”

He invites Hedy, too. So Myka and Hedy go to dinner at Bill’s house, his house that he now shares with his wife, Diana. He married her three weeks after he met her. “I just saw her and knew,” he’d shrugged to Myka when she expressed amazement. “I wouldn’t even call it love at first sight—I knew.” And Myka had remembered: Helena, saying she’d known.

Hedy tells Myka, “This will work out.”

Myka says, “I don’t see how.”

“You will.”

Myka wants to snap, “Don’t be cryptic!” Hedy can be very like Garbo.

Garbo, who now lives in New York, writes Myka a letter. It, like Hedy, is both comforting and frustrating: Garbo is sure that Wells will recover, that Wells will see the error of her ways. Myka wants to write back and say that Wells has often pretended to see the error of her ways, and that has never gotten anybody anywhere.

Every day, though, more people make clear to Myka that they know, they know and it is all right, they know and it is all right and that Helena will be all right and that everything will be fine.

Artie Nielsen comes to see her. His opening gambit is, “I was wrong.”

“Were you?” Myka asks.

“I was. I didn’t know you, and I didn’t know that she would… that this would… I mean, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it. And I thought she was just…”

He’s clearly uncomfortable. Myka takes pity on him. “I understand. I thought the same thing sometimes, when I stopped to think. I didn’t stop to think very often, though, and that probably hurt the picture. Or hurt what she was doing in the picture. I’m sorry for that.”

“You were young,” Artie says, as if that explains everything.

Myka’s pretty sure it doesn’t explain much of anything, but she doesn’t tell Artie that. He says he was wrong yet again, and then again. Myka almost has to promise to make a picture with him to convince him that she accepts the apology.

People Myka has never even met before will say to her, out of the blue, “are you holding up okay” or “I’m glad she’s doing better.” There are young and pretty boys like Steve; women who introduce themselves as Claudia’s former editing compatriots; producers, writers, directors. George Cukor puts his hand on Myka’s shoulder and says, “I can’t even imagine how you feel right now.” Katharine Hepburn tells Myka about what happened to her own brother; Myka has heard that she _never_ talks about her brother. “I know it doesn’t seem so, but you’re lucky,” she says. Myka knows she is right. She hopes she will one day _feel_ that she is right.

Mrs. Frederic, that terrifying yet reassuring personage, has taken to appearing, almost out of nowhere, as if she can sense when Myka needs her. When Myka begins to wonder what will happen when Helena is released from the hospital, Mrs. Frederic materializes and says, “We are sending her to Mexico. For rehabilitation.”

When Myka becomes curious about what will happen to Charles, Mrs. Frederic taps her on the shoulder and says, “I believe you should speak to Claudia.”

****

The fact is, Myka misses Steve. She likes Claudia fine, but she leaned on Steve for years, and to have him gone, now of all times… if she could just see his face. If she could just see his face… if it could just be 1934 again, and she could see his face, and he could explain to her how everything is going to work out.

Claudia has done a fine job with the situation: there is great shrieking in the press about Helena’s “exhaustion,” and whispers in the columns that suggest drugs. There is absolutely nothing about perversion. Myka has been mentioned once, as Helena’s “costar and concerned friend.”

So Myka is grateful to Claudia. But she misses Steve more every time she sees Claudia at his desk.

“Do you have a minute?” Myka asks after she knocks on the office door. “Mrs. Frederic said I should come see you.”

“No intelligence on the patient yet today,” Claudia says. “But I bet you’ll hear her from here when they tell her about Mexico.”

“Something about Charles?” Myka prompts.

“Ohmygosh, I forgot! How could I forget? Yeah, Charles.” Claudia leans back in her chair as if to cross her heels on the desk, then seems to remember that she’s wearing a skirt. She moves forward abruptly and almost knocks her telephone over with her chin. “Sorry. Feeling a little proud of myself, though, because guess what?”

“I don’t know, Claudia,” Myka says. “What?”

“That wasn’t a guess, but I suppose I’ll tell you anyway.” She grins.

“Today?”

“He’s being deported.” Her grin, impossibly, becomes even wider.

Myka stares. “You said deported? How… why?”

“Well, the reason is something something national security. But the _reason_ reason is, my brother.”

“Your brother.” Myka is uncertain as to whether this is likely to make sense at any point.

“Uh huh. He’s a scientist. He’s working on this super-secret government project—it’s so secret he won’t even tell me what it’s called.”

Myka nods. It seems better not to interrupt; maybe she’ll actually get some information if she lets Claudia talk.

“So anyway, he’s working with a lot of scientists who are from, you know, Europe and stuff. And they all know guys in Immigration. And you know how jumpy everybody is about foreigners right now, even if they’re supposedly the good guys… so. Some phone calls, some arm-twisting… some suggestions that maybe Charles is a little bit cuckoo from that other war—seems pretty true, by the way, so I think maybe I’m doing the country a favor if you know what I mean—and there you have it. Deportation!”

This time Claudia does put her feet up on the desk. Her skirt’s actually pretty long, so it’s fine… and Myka thinks she has every right to be this proud of herself. The first thing that comes out of her mouth, though, is: “Helena’s going to kill you.”

Claudia waves that off. “H.G.’s never going to know it was me. Besides, don’t you think she’ll be pretty happy to be rid of the guy? I got him all set up with a place in London. Do you have any idea how much money this studio has over there? They could buy him a castle or twelve, and all they’d think was that they _might_ be missing some pocket change.”

“Won’t he know that the studio’s behind it?”

“Nah, it’ll look like an inheritance. Or something. It’s fine. Don’t worry. He won’t be coming back.”

“He could ruin us from there, Claudia.”

Claudia shakes her head. “I think there are two things you don’t understand. First, he’s a national security risk. He talks to anybody in this country, they’ll think he’s doing some kind of spy business. And second, H.G. just tried to kill herself.”

Myka winces. She hasn’t heard anyone say those exact words, and she has worked overtime not to think them.

“Sorry,” Claudia says. “But I think even her stupid brother doesn’t want her dead. I think she really scared him, because I think he really didn’t understand what she was willing to do for you. To protect you. I mean, he threatened you, right out in the open, right? Of course H.G.’s going to do something extreme. I haven’t even known her that long, and I could figure that out. I don’t know why _he_ couldn’t, though. He’s her _brother_ , for pity’s sake.”

“I don’t think he ever let himself believe what she would be willing to do for people she… cares about.”

“ _Cares about_?”

“Okay,” Myka concedes, “loves. People she loves. Because otherwise, he’d have to acknowledge what she did for him. After the war. And… I don’t know. If he did that, it would mean he wasn’t as strong as he needs to believe he is… that’s just my idea. I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“Maybe you should be,” Claudia says. “Maybe if this movie thing ever falls through—not that I’m saying it will; I think H.G.’s made pretty sure of that—you should think about head-shrinking. Plenty of people here could use it.”

“Including me,” Myka sighs.

“You’ll note I didn’t say ‘present company excluded.’”

Myka smiles. She says to Claudia, because she owes it to her: “I came in here missing Steve.”

“I _sit_ in here missing Steve,” Claudia says.

“I will give you more credit,” Myka says. “To other people, but even in my own head.”

“Which needs to be shrunk, don’t forget,” Claudia says. But she smiles too.

****

Helena leaves for Mexico. She has still, at least as far as Claudia can discern, not expressed a desire to see Myka.

Myka is trying very hard to think of work and nothing else. She is starring in a comedy, and comedy has never been her forte. Trying to pull off some sense of the madcap is of course even more difficult now. But she is working. Some evenings, she attends charity events. Bette Davis has told her that her Hollywood Canteen needs volunteers, and Myka has promised to help. She is busy.

She wishes Pete were home.

She doesn’t mean to count the days, but she does. Thirty-five days since it happened; fourteen since Helena went to Mexico. Nineteen since Helena went to Mexico. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. They stretch and stretch and stretch, and Myka has never gone this long without seeing Helena. She is starving.

Forty-two days after Helena left, sixty-three days since it happened, Claudia asks to see Myka. When Myka presents herself, Claudia says, “She’s back.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 14 tumblr tags: waiting is terrible, but sometimes when it stops it's worse, but sometimes it's better, and sometimes you can't tell which it is until later


	15. Chapter 15

With all of her heart, Myka wants to drive to Helena’s house and hammer on the door and break it down if she has to and push her way in and…

…and there her heart stops, because she doesn’t know what she’ll find.

So she goes home instead.

She sits in the dining room. There is even less food in the house than usual, now that Pete’s been gone, and Myka has taken to not bothering with eating when she’s at home.

It’s just one day. It’s just the first day. Claudia had told her that Helena had got home this very morning, that Myka needed to know, to be warned. Because while Helena was under strict instructions not to come to the studio, not yet, when had Helena ever paid attention to strict instructions? So Claudia was warning Myka that she might see Helena.

Myka was reasonably certain that Claudia was also warning her that she _should not_ see Helena.

It’s dark in the dining room. She should turn on a light; she should read a book or a newspaper or a magazine. Listen to the radio.

But Helena is now just a car ride away.

Of course she was a car ride away when she was in Mexico, too, but Myka had tried very hard not to ask questions about exactly where she was. So that she could not simply get in the car and go to her.

“I am not going to get in the car,” Myka says aloud.

Despite herself, she stands up.

“I am not going to do this,” she says.

She starts walking to the front door. Because Helena is a car ride away, and Myka has been waiting for nine weeks—sixty-three days, and she doesn’t think the number of hours, but she knows that number too—and she has put on the bravest face she can for nine weeks, and she does not think she can wear that face for one more minute, much less an hour or a day.

She takes up her pocketbook and the car keys from the table in the foyer.

The doorbell rings.

Myka looks at her traitorous hands and the objects they hold. She puts her purse and keys back down.

It can’t be, wouldn’t be, could not possibly be…

And it isn’t: but Myka is almost as dumbfounded, because standing at her door, a suitcase at her side, is her sister Tracy.

****

Once Myka has brought Tracy inside, been assured that Tracy is fine, that their parents are fine, that Tracy’s husband Kevin is fine (gone to war, of course, but fine as far as anyone knows), then she thinks to ask: “What in the world could you possibly be doing here?”

“Why is your house so dark?” Tracy asks back.

“Because I was… never mind.” Myka brings Tracy into the dining room and turns on the light. She turns on the kitchen light too. Have they always been this bright?

“It was a very funny thing,” Tracy says. “A woman with the loveliest voice called me. She said she works at your movie studio.”

The loveliest voice? “Oh,” Myka says. “It must have been Mrs. Frederic.”

“Yes! This was two days ago. She said she thought you were going through a rough time, and that you might need your family. I said she should call Mother, but she thought I’d help you more. And she said that if I could come soon, it would be a good idea, that there would be a train ticket anytime I was ready. So here I am.”

“Do Mother and Dad even know?”

“Of course they know! I can’t just disappear from Colorado Springs. I said I was missing Kevin so much, and that I really wanted to see you. And they thought it was wonderful that you had invited me.” She pauses. “You would have, wouldn’t you? If I had needed to see you?”

Myka is still pretty nonplussed that she’s in her dining room having a conversation with her sister. At Mrs. Frederic’s behest. “Tracy,” she says, “you can come here anytime you need to. You really can. You just seem like you want to stay at home. With Kevin. But I guess since he’s not there… _are_ you missing him that much? But right, yes, I’m sure you are. I’m sorry, I’m being stupid. Today’s been… a little difficult.”

“Is this the rough time?” Tracy asks. “What’s wrong? Is it something to do with Pete?”

Myka huffs out a breath. “No. Not Pete. He’s fine—I mean, he’s fine like Kevin’s fine: as far as I know.”

“Then what? You really don’t look good, now that I see you in the light. You look so tired. And skinny.”

“Well, I can’t cook,” Myka says.

“I actually can’t cook very well either. I think it’s a family trait. Kevin’s much better at it than I am, but don’t tell Mother—she’ll think _she’s_ the one who’s a failure.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Myka assures her.

They sit in silence.

“Myka,” Tracy says eventually. “Please tell me. You look like you want to cry. Or… maybe explode. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“I’m really not sure I can,” Myka says. But she is seriously considering it, and as she considers it, she begins to feel an unanticipated little burr of something that feels very like _pride_ rumbling inside her. Because it is _Helena_ , and even now Myka is sure that no one is more beautiful, talented, extraordinary… Pete is perfectly fine, but Helena is breathtaking. Myka wishes she could have said Helena’s name before, when it was still real, when she knew it was still real, instead of… whatever it is now. Whatever it _isn’t_ now. “I told you it wasn’t Pete, that I didn’t love Pete.”

“I remember. I haven’t told anyone, if you’re worried about that. Whatever your reasons were, or are.”

“It’s Helena,” Myka says.

Tracy tilts her head. “Helena? Helena who?” Then her eyes get big. “Helena _Wells_?” Then she tilts her head again. “Wait. I don’t understand. What does she have to do with Pete? Or you and Pete? Oh my gosh, is _she_ the one Pete wanted to marry?”

Now Myka’s tilting her head. “What? Helena and Pete? No, that’s… crazy. That’s not even… no, Tracy, it’s _me_. It’s Helena and _me_.”

“What is?”

Myka leans forward onto her elbows. She interlaces her fingers. “Okay,” she says. She grips her fingers tighter. “We’re a couple. Or… we were. No one knows about it—well, actually a lot of people know about it, but only here. Nobody out there. Because it’s different out there.” She unlaces her fingers, waves a hand. A vague hand. She isn’t entirely sure, anymore, where “out there” is.

“I guess it is,” Tracy says.

“Are you okay?” Myka asks.

“I’m fine. Are _you_ okay?”

“No,” Myka says. “Because I love her.” And then she tells Tracy everything.

****

For almost a week, it is a weird magic trick, every evening when Myka comes home: someone pulls the cover off what she thought was Hollywood, and suddenly there is her sister and Colorado Springs.

“You’re actually a really good cook,” Myka tells Tracy the fourth night, as she’s wolfing down meatloaf.

“You’re just saying that because you haven’t had any food in… what is it? Nine weeks?”

“Nine and a half,” says Myka. Her mouth is full. “Well, in the middle of the day today, or the middle of the afternoon I mean, it was nine and a half.”

“And nothing yet? Not a single word?”

“Nothing. She hasn’t even been to the studio, as far as Claudia knows.”

“At some point, you’re going to have to do something,” Tracy says. “If only so you can eat and sleep like a human again.”

“I know. But I’m trying to be good. This is the good thing to do, isn’t it? To leave her alone? To wait?”

“How should I know? The both of you are completely crazy, as far as I can tell. I mean, even beyond being peculiar. Eat some vegetables.”

“I don’t like vegetables,” Myka complains. But she accepts the succotash Tracy piles on her plate.

****

At the one week mark, Helena does show up at the studio. Myka knows because almost every single person she sees touches her on the arm, the shoulder, the back. Each one says “I’m so happy for you” or “give H.G. my love.”

Myka wants to yell, at every single one of them, “I can’t even give her my own love!”

Instead, she says “thank you so much” and “she’ll be glad to hear that.”

It does not escape her, the irony of having to hide the fact that there is no longer anything to hide.

****

On the evening of that seventh day, Tracy says, “I think I’m a better cook in California than I am in Colorado.”

She has made chicken with barbecue sauce. Myka has never had such delicious chicken in her life. Yes, Myka’s appetite is returning, and yes, she’s clearly been starving herself, but this chicken is really very good. “I think if Kevin tasted this, he would never let you out of the kitchen,” she says.

“I don’t think I’ll make it for him then. It’s so sweet when he cooks. He sighs, like it’s a burden, but then it’s perfect.”

Myka feels tears gather behind her nose. “That’s…. Helena. Exactly. What she would do, always. Aggrieved, then… something you never even dreamed of. Or a sandwich. It didn’t matter.” The doorbell rings, and Myka sighs. “What horrible timing, right when my face is red. Probably collecting for a war charity.”

“Your face isn’t that red,” Tracy assures her.

****

It isn’t a charity.

This time, of course, because she is not ready, not prepared, not _braced_ : Helena.

And Myka laughs. Myka laughs, and Helena stiffens and turns to leave, and Myka grabs her by the arm, turns her back around. “Where are you going? Honestly, you came here. You came here to say something, I hope, so say it.”

“What. I. Did. Was. Wrong.” Helena says each word distinctly. Then she turns to leave again, and Myka watches her begin to walk away.

“Hey!” Tracy says from right behind Myka.

Helena turns back to the house.

“Oh my god!” Tracy exclaims. “You’re really Helena Wells!” Her tone is adoring.

Myka knows: Helena cannot for the life of her resist a fan. “Yes,” Helena says. “I am.”

“You have to try this chicken,” Tracy says. “I’m a terrible cook, usually, but it turned out really well.”

And for some reason, this non sequitur captures Helena’s attention. “Chicken?” she says.

“Well, Myka likes it, anyway, so maybe you will too. I’m Tracy, her sister. Maybe she mentioned me? Because she’s told me all about you.” Tracy steps in front of Myka, takes Helena’s arm, and draws her inside. “And I mean _all_ about you. Kind of backwards; I heard about Mexico first, and I hope you’re feeling better now. You look like you’ve been eating better than Myka has, anyway…”

They move toward the dining room. Myka closes the front door, leans against it, and wonders when exactly her sister became a magician.

****

They sit at the dining room table and eat chicken together: Myka, Helena, and Tracy.

Tracy chatters on about Mexico and Hollywood and Colorado and snow and sun and _chicken_. Myka stares at Helena.

Because she looks different. Myka can’t quite place the difference, but it is something to do with her shoulders, she thinks, how she holds them… or her neck, how she turns it. Or her eyes, how they are quiet, slightly somewhere else… or her hands, how they are calm. Every part of her, it seems, is different, and Myka takes it until she cannot take it anymore. She starts to cry: at first softly, and neither Tracy nor Helena hears or sees, but then louder, until she can barely hold her head up, and they both see and hear, and Tracy says, “I’m going to clean up.”

And Myka is left alone with Helena. She expects Helena to stand up and walk out.

Instead, Helena says, “You so rarely cry.”

“Well,” Myka says, “things have changed.”

“They have,” Helena says.

“I can’t do this,” Myka tells her.

“All right,” Helena says, and now she does stand as if to leave.

“No!” Myka exclaims. “Don’t go!”

“But you just said—”

“What I can’t do,” Myka says, “is sit here and wait. I can’t sit here and not know. Do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

Myka can’t read her tone. “Then how do you feel?”

“I feel… tired.”

“So do I,” Myka says. She feels the tears begin again.

“Please don’t cry,” Helena says.

“Then don’t make me cry. Do you not understand? You could have died, but instead you’re standing here in front of me.”

“I said I was wrong to do it. I mean that. I know I was.”

Myka is sobbing now. “I know why you did it. I know why. Charles betrayed you, I lied to you. All of that at once. I know you thought it was the only way out. I know you wanted out. You would have done anything to get away, from both of us, and I don’t blame you for that—we were the ones who hurt you. What I blame you for is being so stupid that you almost died!”

“I was trying to save you!”

“And punish me!”

Helena sits down again. “Yes. And punish you. Even though, as you said, you were only trying to save us.”

“I failed.”

“You didn’t.”

And Myka laughs through her tears. “Yes, I did. Look at us.”

Something changes. In that moment, something changes. “I am looking at _you_ ,” Helena says. “I am looking at you, and I am seeing what I did to you.”

“Undo it,” Myka says.

“I can’t.”

“You’re the only one who can.” Myka stands now. She goes to Helena and kneels beside her chair. “For almost seventy days, I have waited to find out if you would even speak to me again. Now you’re speaking to me. I can’t wait another minute to find out if you’ll touch me again. Please. Undo it. Just undo it. I was wrong. I lied to you, and that was wrong. I’ll do better next time. Please let there be a next time.” She leans her head against Helena’s arm. Just this, she thinks, would do. Just this, forever. In a room, in a house, pressing against her, forever.

Helena leans her head down. Myka turns hers up. Their lips meet, and it is still there. Everything is still there. Myka cries again, and Helena’s fingers rise to push the tears from her face.

Helena says, “Tonight, when I came here, I thought to leave you for good. For your own good, and for mine.”

“You thought wrong,” Myka says. “That isn’t good. You know it isn’t.”

And now Helena’s eyes glisten. “I know. I know it now.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 15 tumblr tags: they are not out of the woods, but they are not meant to be apart, right?, stupid show does not understand, so we have to understand it for them


	16. Chapter 16

In the dark of that night, they are both exhausted, but they don’t sleep, not for a long time. They sit, at first, on the bed, not touching, not like strangers, but not touching. Then they lie down—closer, but still not comfortable. They talk a little, on and off.

Myka asks, “Why tonight? You’ve been back for a week.”

Helena says, “Because when I went to the studio today, all I heard, from everyone, was that Myka must be so happy, Myka must be so relieved, you seem so much better and that will be so much better for Myka.”

Myka laughs quietly. “That’s all I heard too, except the other way around.”

“It enraged me.” She says this quite calmly.

“Me too. Probably for different reasons.”

“My reasons were selfish: I was the aggrieved party, yet everyone was concerned about you.”

“In their defense, they’d seen me every day, and I wasn’t doing incredibly well. Waiting. So I was angry because they all thought it was fine now—because you were finally back, I would be fine. They thought the waiting was over, and I was feeling like it was never going to end.”

Helena says, “It might not have done. I hadn’t intended to see you.”

“Why not?” Myka demands softly.

She can feel Helena shrug against the bed. “I feared the outcome. I didn’t want to know.”

“Didn’t you consider that it might have been… well, ‘good’ is the wrong word, it’s going to take a long time for anything to be good, but… better?”

“I did consider that. I didn’t know if either of us deserved for it to be better.”

“You still don’t know, do you?”

“Not entirely. Do you?”

Myka rolls on her side to look at Helena, as well as she can in the dark. “I don’t think there’s any way of telling, anymore, what anyone deserves. Your brother didn’t deserve what happened to him in the war. You didn’t deserve what he did to you. I don’t think Pete and Amanda deserve to be unhappy in the way they are, just because Pete made mistakes. Steve having to hide who he is, you and I having to hide, everyone else who has to… everyone who’s being sent to war, they don’t deserve that. Tracy loves her husband, and he’s gone. She loves _me_. Do I deserve that?” She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t know what anybody deserves. You and I, with each other? I think if we can make it better, we should.”

“If we can.” Helena turns her head now. Her head is an inky shadow against the white of the pillow. “Can we?”

“I don’t see the point of not trying.”

“What if it doesn’t work? I still don’t feel… I’m not sure what to call it: fully myself? I don’t know what that will mean.”

“Neither of us is the same,” Myka says. “Why did you call me?”

“When?”

“That night. Did you want me to stop you?”

“I thought it was too late for you to stop me. I was being selfish again: I wanted to cause you pain. And I also,” she makes a noise that is something like a laugh, “completely contradictorily, wanted to hear your voice.”

Contradictory wants. When Myka goes to sleep, eventually, her mind is on contradictory wants.

****

Myka awakens alone—feeling an instant of fear, that she has merely had a dream of Helena—but then she sees that she is not in the middle of the bed. Then she hears two voices, both of them female.

She finds them in the kitchen.

“No, no!” Helena is saying, “more eggs!” And she moves to break another into the bowl over which they are both hovering.

Tracy bats her hands away. “I told you, these are pancakes! Not fancy French anythings! Only one egg!”

“Are you not the one who said you are a terrible cook?”

“Anybody can make pancakes!”

Myka says, “I can’t.”

Helena drops the egg.

Tracy sighs. “It’s true, Myka, you can’t.” She looks down at the floor, then back up at Helena. “And apparently _you_ can’t keep from making a mess in the kitchen. The flour before, and now this…”

Myka notices that Helena does seem to have a certain amount of flour dusted across her shirt front.

“I think it is your negative influence,” Helena sniffs at Tracy. “I am generally quite coordinated.” But she does take a dishrag and begin to clean up the egg.

“How long have you two been at this?” Myka asks.

“Too long,” Tracy says. “But not long enough to actually get any pancakes made.”

“Do _not_ blame me!” Helena warns.

“Well, Myka wasn’t up yet, so I can’t blame her, and it isn’t _my_ fault, so…”

Yesterday morning, Myka had dragged herself out of bed, gray with fatigue, and Tracy had struggled to get her to say “good morning,” much less look at the bowl of oatmeal she put in front of her; she had faced the prospect of yet another day of waiting, minutes ticking into hours.

Today, she has walked into a teasing argument between Tracy and Helena. The difference is staggering—the time between then and now feels like years—but more than that, she had not believed a morning like this one _to be possible_. Not a week ago, certainly, and not even yesterday.

“I just want you to know,” she says, “that I love you both very much.” She goes to wash her face, because she has started crying again.

****

Myka is scolded in the makeup chair for her puffy eyes.

Then she is scolded on the set for her lack of concentration. (Though the script girl whispers to her, “You know the reason we _hope_ you’re tired, right?” Myka tries to look shocked, then laughs and whispers back, “Think what you want.”)

Then, late in the day, she is scolded by Claudia for not coming to see her first thing in the morning, even before the makeup chair.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” Myka says.

“Of course you’re supposed to! Because how am _I_ supposed to know things, such as _somebody spent the night at your house_ , if you don’t tell me about them first thing?”

“How do you know somebody spent the night at my house?” How, Myka wonders, could it possibly be starting up again? Already, again?

“Because she told me she did! Why can’t you _prepare_ me for these conversations? You would have prepared Steve!”

Myka smiles. “Doesn’t it mean I’m giving you more credit? That I think you can handle yourself in these conversations?”

“With H.G.? Are you nuts?” Claudia shakes her head. “But also, if you don’t come to see me, how am I supposed to tell you things?”

“What things?”

“Guess!”

“Why do you always make me guess? Steve never made me guess.”

“Tell me when H.G. spends the night at your house, and I won’t make you guess.”

“I guess I’ll keep guessing, then.”

“You are kind of a pain for lots of reasons that Steve never bothered to mention to me.”

“Claudia, what do you need to tell me?”

“Oh. Right. This is why I had the conversation with H.G. in the first place: you’re doing another picture together. Because that comedy wraps in, what, two weeks? Less than that, right? And then they’re going to rehabilitate H.G.’s image by putting her with you again. Isn’t that the funniest thing?”

“Hilarious,” Myka agrees. “Where is she now, by the way?”

“How should I know? At your house, probably.”

“Why would she be at my house?”

Claudia rolls her eyes.

****

Helena is, in fact, at Myka’s house. She and Tracy are in the kitchen again, and they are arguing again.

Myka listens from the front hall.

“If you would just allow me to arrange the crisps artfully,” Helena says.

“They’re potato chips, and you aren’t supposed to _arrange them artfully_!” Tracy tells her. “You leave them in the bag, and you roll them with a rolling pin, and then you sprinkle them over the tuna!”

“I doubt your sister owns a rolling pin.”

“Then we’ll use the mushroom soup can.”

“That tinned monstrosity is no more mushroom soup than I am Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“Well, _Eleanor_ , I don’t really care, because this is how you make tuna casserole!”

But they are clearly having a marvelous time. Myka had thought that Tracy would like Helena, and she had hoped the reverse would be true, but even though she had witnessed the scene this morning, she… she thinks that she is really going to have to stop crying. Only so much makeup and lighting can be applied to a face, after all.

She walks into the kitchen.

Helena is holding a bag of potato chips, and Tracy is brandishing a can of mushroom soup at… well, either at Helena or at the potato chips; Myka can’t quite tell.

It is as if Helena and Tracy are acting out script pages written specifically to make Myka’s heart take off into the sky.

Helena notices Myka first. “Your sister claims this will be edible!” she exclaims.

Tracy gasps. “This is our mother’s recipe! I am going to tell her you said that, and won’t you be sorry then!”

That brings Myka’s heart back to earth, resoundingly. “I think telling Mother is probably not the wisest thing to do. Even though Helena does deserve some kind of shaming. I mean, she hasn’t even tasted it yet.”

Helena pouts. “I deserve no such thing. Just look at the _ingredients_.”

“I know the ingredients. I’ve eaten the ingredients a million times.”

“We both have,” Tracy says. “And from what I’ve heard about English cooking, I don’t think you have a lot of room to talk about ingredients. Don’t you eat a lot of sheep?”

“Sheep?!”

And they are off and running again, and Myka just leans against the wall and watches it happen. Storing it for later. She is fairly certain she’ll need it.

****

After dinner, after coffee, after listening to part of Bill Powell and Hedy Lamarr’s performance of “Love Crazy” on Lux Radio Theater (“Wasn’t Myrna Loy in that movie?” Tracy asked, and both Myka and Helena explained, talking over each other, “Yes, but Bill and Hedy are doing a comedy together soon”), Myka and Helena go to Myka’s bedroom and prepare for bed, as if this is what they do every night. As if they have never done anything else.

“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” Myka says. “But… why are you here?”

Helena says, “I thought we left things unresolved last night.” She looks around, as if she is suddenly surprised to discover where they are. “I didn’t intend… I’m sorry. I just…”

“It’s all right,” Myka says. “It’s more than all right. You can stay, and you can fight with Tracy every day, and you can sleep here every night.”

“We both know I can’t.”

“Eventually. But for now, practically everyone at the studio who knows anything about anything seems to know about us, and if anyone isn’t happy about it? They’re keeping it to themselves.”

“That is most likely Mrs. Frederic’s doing.”

“Most likely,” Myka says. Then she says, “Contradictory wants.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s where we left it last night. Contradictory wants.”

“Oh,” Helena says. “Yes. Causing you pain, listening to you speak.”

“I have some contradictory wants, too,” Myka says.

“Do you.”

Myka breathes. “For example. I want to kiss you. But I also want to keep from scaring you into leaving.”

Helena breathes too. “I could try to be clever. I could say something like ‘why don’t you try the former and see what happens.’”

“You could.”

“I don’t want to be clever.”

“Okay. You don’t have to be.”

“I like your sister very much,” Helena says instead.

“I’m glad.”

Now Helena says, “It’s… funny.”

“It kind of is,” Myka agrees.

“No, no—didn’t Claudia tell you the news?”

“About the new picture? Yes, but what does that—”

“She clearly didn’t tell you about our _roles_ in the new picture.”

“Our roles? Okay, what are they?”

Helena laughs. “Sisters. We’re to play sisters.”

Myka rubs her eyes, hard. Then she stops, because she’s sure someone in Makeup will yell at her about the skin around her eyes tomorrow. “Oh my _god_ … the things people are going to _say_! If this is somebody’s idea of a joke, it isn’t funny _at all_.”

“No,” Helena agrees, “but you have to admit, it is a bit clever.” She stops talking and just looks at Myka. For minutes, it seems, lengthened minutes, she just looks. “I missed you,” she finally says.

“I missed you too.”

“I’m glad your sister has been here.”

“I am too.”

“Because I needed help.”

Myka is trying to keep her tone very casual. “With?”

“Getting to you. Getting _myself_ to you.”

“Oh.” Helena has to be the one to make this move. Myka can’t do it. She can’t. She knows what will happen if she does, and it might be momentarily bright, but she does not want momentarily bright.

“If you want me to leave, I will,” Helena says. “I will go back to my own house.”

“If you do,” Myka says, “I will follow you there. Unless you tell me not to.”

“You said it last night: I had been back for a week. Now I have been back for a week and one day. I don’t want to wait. You counted the days.”

“I counted the hours,” Myka tells her.

“You counted the hours,” Helena says. “All right. Start your count again.”

“What?”

Helena moves her face, clearly to keep from crying. Neither of them is a crier, not really, though each has made the other cry more than she ever should. “Start from now. This hour. From now, we will do better.”

“Both of us,” Myka says. She feels something in her begin to relax. She takes a breath: “Are you sure?”

Helena shrugs. “I told you, I don’t want to be clever. So the answer to your question is no. I’m not sure. I’m not at all sure.”

“Okay,” Myka says. “Good.”

They lunge at each other, as they did when they were young. As they did when everything was different. Everything was different then, but it is still the same now: they are bodies, and they want, and they collide, and they are _remade_. And they know each other so well, but everything they know is new, and old, and Myka thinks she will die, from happiness and love and sheer incredulity, because she had genuinely believed, in so many of those counted hours, that this would never, ever happen again.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 16 tumblr tags: it's really really hard to have them apart in any way, even philosophically, even if one of them has tried to (metaphorically) end the world with a salad fork, so this is the picking up of the pieces from that, I just couldn't leave her in the pokéball for more than a day, so sue me


	17. Chapter 17

“‘Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion.’ Now the fashion for war has faded, they are back to seeking their entertainment in lechery.” Helena is moody. Myka doesn’t blame her.

Everything has changed yet again, with the end of the war and the return of the men. While a raucous, giddy joy seemed to grab the nation and everyone in it—including everyone in Hollywood—for a short time, it soon became clear that that mood would not persist.

Of the people Myka knew, Steve had come home first. He stepped immediately back into his job; Claudia was downgraded to his assistant.

“It’s not that I mind, exactly,” Claudia had said, in confidence, to Myka. “It’s just that… I thought I was doing pretty good. Even with the _problems_ like you and H.G. I thought I sort of had a knack.”

Myka had thought so too. She and Helena had practically been living together, mostly in Myka’s house, for almost three years, and no one had said more than two words about it. (The two words were usually, “Oh, really?”, and whoever said them usually sounded almost bored.) Friends came to dinner; Helena cooked. She and Myka even ventured out together on occasion. They were still careful, of course, but they had shed the fear of constantly being watched—particularly at the studio. And they knew that Claudia kept her ears wide open for any whisper that might cause them harm.

Outside the studio, of course, Charles was no longer a factor, and Myka had Claudia to thank for that too. She couldn’t say anything specifically about the solution to that problem, but felt she owed it to Claudia to make some kind of argument on her behalf. So she had made an appointment, soon after the demotion took place, to see Mrs. Frederic.

“I can’t help you,” Mrs. Frederic had said, almost immediately upon hearing Myka’s plea.

“But Claudia’s been so impressive. She really has. Even if she just weren’t _called_ an assistant, she might feel better about it.”

“Miss Bering,” Mrs. Frederic said. “Myka. Listen to me very carefully. It is no longer wartime. Many things are going to change. I would caution you to be careful. You, and Miss Wells, and Claudia, and all the other women who have come to feel a certain sense of… freedom. Even I myself am finding that various customary barriers are rising once again.”

Myka tried to take this warning to heart, but it was difficult… especially when she and Helena still went home to the same house every night; slept blissfully, or didn’t sleep, also blissfully, in the same bed; woke grumpily to the same alarm clock. They signed the same letters to Tracy, too, for as Helena said, simply, “I owe her a great debt.”

Then Pete had come home.

He was in one piece, and he had seemed like himself: glad to be there, glad to see everyone, glad to come to the studio and shake hands and be a veteran. He hadn’t been one of the stars assigned to units designed to keep their pretty faces safe; no, he’d actually fought the war. Myka overheard one enthusiastic writer say the words “Omaha Beach” to him, and Pete had tensed up. He’d said, “I really don’t want to talk about that.”

Helena had absented herself from the house for the first few days after his return: “I suppose it is in fact his house more than mine,” she’d said, exaggeratedly aggrieved. Myka kissed her once for being understanding, then twice for being Helena.

But on the third day, he’d brought a bottle home with him.

After an hour of listening to it clink repeatedly against the lip of a glass, Myka said to him, “I’m going to Helena’s. Are you going to be all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” he said.

And Myka debated whether to say it, but in the end she did, because she knew she would have wanted, would still want, someone to say the same kind of thing to Helena: “How will Amanda feel about this?”

Pete laughed. “How will Amanda know about this?”

“Pete, I really think you should slow down.”

He laughed again. “Myka. I really think we should be clear about the fact that even though we have a piece of paper that says you’re my wife, what you think isn’t all that important.”

Myka decided it would be a good idea to stay home. Just in case.

It didn’t stop, even when Pete went back to work. Producers wanted to cast him as a villain rather than a lead, a villain’s henchman, in fact—and that depressed him further. “I don’t mind being a tough guy,” he told Myka early one evening. “I just don’t want to be a _bad_ guy.”

He saw Amanda sometimes, but not nearly as often as he had before the war. That meant he was home more often than not, and Myka began spending more time—familiarly clandestine, late-night time—at Helena’s. Friends didn’t come to dinner anymore.

Steve made sure to place, as quickly as he could, an article about Pete and Myka’s joyous reunion and happily resumed marriage.

He heard a rumor—just a hint, he said, that there might be trouble between them—so he placed another one.

Now he has had to place a third, this one openly speculating that they might be starting a family.

Helena sees this one. Myka has no idea how, because Helena is generally more inclined to burn fan magazines for warmth than to read them—but she sees it, and she spouts her “war and lechery” quote, and she sulks.

“Do you think I feel in any way good about this?” Myka asks her.

“No.” But it is a reluctant “no.”

“In the first place, I am not in favor of having children. With Pete or anybody else, and I hate having people thinking that I am. Second, he is disintegrating. Right in front of me, and I don’t know what to do about it. And third, I feel like you and I are being punished for having been happy for a while. So this is not a good time for me either, okay?”

“Okay,” Helena says, and now she sounds apologetic.

“We’ll just have to get through this somehow.” But Myka is not feeling optimistic. She is angry at Pete for taking her life with Helena away from her, even though she cannot be angry at Pete, because he helped give her her life with Helena in the first place. And even that pales in comparison to the war, which he went to, and she did not.

She wishes she knew how to find Amanda. What she would tell Amanda, or ask her, she doesn’t know. But she does know that she is probably not going to be able to handle Pete by herself forever.

****

The castle is crumbling, bit by bit. Movie attendance is down overall. M-G-M in particular is producing fewer films, and selling fewer tickets to the ones it does produce. Stars are leaving.

Communists are being rooted out.

Pete, at least, is not a communist—but he has now taken to going out at night rather than staying in. He is becoming known around town for the wrong reasons, and he is becoming a liability for the studio. Mr. Mayer finally calls him in and suggests that he take his talents, such as they are, elsewhere.

He doesn’t show up at home that night, and Myka doesn’t know what to do.

She wants to be there, if he comes in, but she doesn’t want to face him alone—so she calls Helena.

“Are you sure this is all right?” she asks when she arrives. “It’s seemed lately that I should not be here.”

Myka throws her arms around Helena. “You should always be here. I hate that you’re never here anymore.” Then she’s embarrassed at her display. They’re past this kind of thing, surely—but Helena grips Myka tightly too, to keep her from letting go.

“They won’t say I’m a communist, will they?” Helena asks after a moment. “To push me out? If they’ve let Pete go…”

“What does that have to do with anything? Why would anybody say you’re a communist?”

“I’m _foreign_ ,” Helena says, “and thus by definition un-American. I’m foreign, I am… eccentric, and above all, I am expendable. How easy it would be for someone, anyone, to throw me to the wolves. Artie, for example, might look to exact revenge for all that I have put him through.”

“Artie loves you! You know that! He acts like he hates you, but he really does love you. And why would they even talk to Artie?”

“Because he is of Russian extraction. I have thought this through.”

“Why? Since when?”

“Since that supposedly secret government inquisition at the Biltmore in May.”

“You’ve been sitting on this for months and you just now decided to talk to me about it?”

“You’ve been concerned about Pete. And rightfully so. I didn’t think I should burden you with something else, something that might not even be relevant.”

“It’s relevant if you’re scaring yourself to death over it.” And she very clearly is. They are still standing in the hallway, holding each other, and Helena feels oddly fragile, now, in Myka’s arms. “I won’t tell you not to worry,” Myka says, “because you’re obviously going to, no matter what. But what I will tell you is that if they let you go, we will figure something out.”

“How?” She says it as if she really thinks Myka might have an answer.

“We just will.” Myka knows it sounds like she’s being stubborn instead of thoughtful, but she hasn’t got any answers, and they _will_ just have to solve such a problem if it becomes a problem. And it might… not because of communism, Myka doesn’t really believe that, but because contracts are being dropped left and right. Stars, particularly aging ones, _are_ being pushed out, and _very_ young faces that bear _very_ new names are taking their places on posters and billboards and lobby cards. Helena is over forty; Myka herself is past thirty-five. She sighs. “Come on, let’s go sit down.”

Helena shakes her head. “I don’t want to sit down.”

“You want to stand here all night?” Myka asks, smiling.

“No. I want to go to bed. Like we used to: just go to bed, as if it were any other night.”

Myka smiles again. “And just see what happens?”

Helena smiles back. “That would be fine.”

The night is restorative.

****

They are drinking coffee (made by Helena) in the dining room when Pete gets home at 6 a.m. He looks terrible: face bristled, tie askew, shirt only semi-tucked.

“Oh, great,” he says when he sees Helena. “Because I can’t be gone one night without _this_.”

“I’m pretty sure _this_ isn’t your business,” Myka tells him.

“ _Nothing’s_ my business,” he says. “Not you, not acting, and, oh yeah, not Amanda anymore either.”

Not unexpected… still, “I’m so sorry,” Myka says.

“Yeah, well. Just my luck to have fallen for a woman who sticks to her word. She said it would be over if I did this again, and guess what, it’s over. So I might as well keep on doing this again. And again and again and again.” He slumps into a chair and puts his head down on the table.

“Pete,” Helena says.

Myka starts, “I really don’t think—”

Helena then says, “Myka, would you excuse us for a moment?” She reaches over and touches Myka’s hand. “It’s all right. I just think Pete and I may have some… common ground.”

So Myka goes to bathe and dress. She peeks in on them once. Helena is saying, “That is not a choice you wish to make _inadvertently_ , Pete. Or, trust me, at all.”

Myka thanks everything she can think to thank that Helena is alive and in her dining room.

****

Pete puts himself back together, slowly. It takes meetings. It takes _years_ of meetings. It takes slips and mistakes and recoveries and some triumphs: he goes to work for Universal, appearing in low-budget detective movies, horror movies, science-fiction movies. Universal has no problem with his slightly tarnished image, as long as they see that he is trying not to tarnish it further.

Improbably, he continues to confide in Helena as time passes. Their lives, Myka’s, Helena’s, and Pete’s, take on a strange yet reliable rhythm: most days, there will be dinner at Myka and Pete’s house, after which Myka and Helena go to Helena’s.

But the world will not stop changing simply because they have found an equilibrium.

Now it is 1954.

December of 1952 saw the debut of a magazine entitled _Confidential_. The gossip columns had been bad; _Confidential_ , however, is… it would make no sense to say it is worse, for it is a completely different animal. Its intention is to destroy—not just expose, but destroy. Steve’s hair takes on strands of white as he tries to keep everyone, _everyone_ out of its pages. Claudia, still his assistant, seems never to leave the studio.

Helena is inclined to dismiss this new threat. “We are so _adept_ at hiding,” she says to Myka.

And they are. They are adept at hiding in plain sight, too. They have, almost surreptitiously, appeared in eleven films together over the past ten years. It has been easier as their parts have grown smaller, granted, but they are able to present themselves convincingly to the world as coworkers, as friends, as two people who have known each other for so long that it would make absolutely no sense for them to avoid each other.

Almost twenty years have passed since Steve first told them it was _imperative_ that they avoid each other.

Myka likes to imagine that the ring she wears on the third finger of her left hand symbolizes those twenty years. She likes to imagine that Helena wears a matching ring—even though Helena wears no rings. No jewelry at all, in fact. Myka thinks that perhaps, at that twenty-year mark, she will give Helena something to wear. Something like a necklace, that she can bear privately, surreptitiously. (She has in the past given Helena clothes, just to feel the silly yet illicit thrill of seeing her wear them in the company of other people.) Myka makes Pete go with her to buy the necklace; it wouldn’t look right for a woman to buy herself anything that appeared to be romantic.

She has the necklace in its box in her handbag when she responds to a summons from Steve and Claudia. Helena is there too, and Myka feels a momentary sense of delight, thinking of the present right here, concealed.

But Steve and Claudia both have their pale fingers in their red hair, and Helena looks up and says immediately, “Sit down.”

Myka sits.

Steve says, “ _Confidential_ says they have letters. They say they have letters that you and Helena both signed, and they say they make your situation very very clear.”

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 17 tumblr tags: Confidential magazine was hideous, particularly to gay people, but really to anybody they could get a bit of dirt on, I'm not saying that people in Hollywood were paragons of virtue, because lord no, but careers were ruined for no reason, and furthermore while I am of several minds with regard to outing, I think outing people in a dangerous environment is inexcusable, I have strong feelings about this


	18. Chapter 18

Myka says to Steve, “You just called her Helena. You never do that.”

Steve says, bleakly, “It’s why I think they’re for real. That’s how they’re signed. Somebody who _thinks_ they’re in the know, who’s trying to _pretend_ they’re in the know, they’d put ‘H.G.,’ but it’s ‘Helena’; it’s ‘Myka and Helena.’ They’re written to your sister, Myka, and they’re from when the war was on. Did you two write letters to your sister during the war?”

Myka can barely speak. “We did. We still do, sometimes. But I don’t… why… how would anyone at _Confidential_ get them?”

Steve says, “They said they bought them.”

“From Tracy? She would never.”

Steve shakes his head. “They didn’t say from who. But it doesn’t matter, not really—they have them, and they have you, and I’m so sorry, but I don’t know what to do.”

He touches his forehead and bows forward a bit, almost as if he is praying, and for a moment, for Myka, it is 1941 all over again. She looks at Helena. In 1941, if Helena had been in this office, she would have been arming herself for battle; she would _already_ be storming barricades. Now, she just seems overwhelmed. She leans toward Myka and says, softly, “We knew it would happen someday.”

Myka thinks about the box in her purse. “I didn’t think it would be today.”

The office is very quiet.

But then: “Wait,” Claudia says. “I have an idea.”

“What?” Myka, Helena, and Steve ask in unison.

“Tell them to run it.”

“That’s not an idea,” Steve says. “That’s a disaster.”

“I don’t think it is. Hear me out. Look, we’re to the point in both your careers, Myka not quite yet but almost, where you aren’t romantic leads anymore. Right? I mean, if we’re being honest. H.G., you’re forty-eight. You haven’t played a lead role in how many years now?”

“I have not _counted_ ,” Helena says.

Myka thinks that Claudia’s idea may be to try to get herself killed so she doesn’t have to deal with the situation anymore.

Claudia goes on, “See, I think you’re all thinking like it’s twenty years ago. It’s not.”

Steve says, “No. It’s even worse now.”

Claudia sighs. “Listen to me. It _would_ be worse if H.G. and Myka were twenty years younger, if they were still trying to be who they were then. But they’re not. Right? Which makes me ask myself a couple of questions: first, why does _Confidential_ care so much?”

Steve says, as if she’s being deliberately obtuse, “Because it’s scandalous.”

Claudia sighs again. “Sure, but honestly? Some story about H.G. and Myka having at it a decade ago? That isn’t gonna sell a whole bunch of magazines. Which brings me to my second question: why did we get this advance warning?”

“Because…” Steve stops short. “Wait. That’s actually a really good question.”

“Right? Because you know if they actually have the goods, they just _run it_. They just drop that bomb.” Claudia leans forward. “But we’re sitting here talking about it, which means they’re trying to scare us into something. Okay, they’ve got those letters. _We_ know they’re real. But how do _they_ know they’re real? If they really, totally believe they are, then the bomb drops, boom, that’s it. So here’s what I think’s going on: I think they want us to panic—in the first place, because I think that Harrison guy who owns the rag just likes to cause trouble, but in the second place, I think they probably think they can get us to give up something even better in order to protect you, since we still have _some_ bank in your game. If we do that, then they have two things: one, confirmation that they’re right about you two, and two, some info about somebody else that they also now know is true.”

Steve is staring at her like he’s never seen her before. “When… when did you learn to think this way?”

Claudia laughs. “Steve. Sweet, strangely innocent Steve. I’ve always thought this way. Plus, my brother’s still with the government, and I’m pretty sure you know what’s going on with the government now, for people like him. The things I’ve heard about how they catch people? I think overall you three should be pretty happy you’re here and not in Washington.”

Helena gathers herself enough to say, “So let me see if I understand you. You think we should simply…”

“Call their bluff.” Claudia nods. “Yes I do. But even more than that: I think we should up the ante. “

“Oh god,” Steve groans.

Claudia cackles. “This is the part where I get a promotion. Myka, you were telling me a few weeks ago about Pete and that girl he likes, who won’t go out with him because he’s married to you, right?”

Myka is surprised that Claudia remembers. “Kelly. Yes. He’s still upset about it. He tried to sort of explain it to her, without really explaining, but I don’t think she understood. She isn’t even in the business… I think she’s probably just a decent person.”

“Perfect,” Claudia pronounces. “Because here is what is going to happen: you are going to get a divorce.”

Myka is pretty sure she didn’t hear that correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

Claudia says, “Well, a separation to start with. And you are going to ostentatiously move out of your house, and go to stay in the spare bedroom of your very good friend Helena Wells.”

Myka, Steve, and Helena all gape at her.

“Take _that_ , Confidential jackasses.” Claudia dusts her palms together.

Eventually, Helena clears her throat. “However,” she says, “there is still the small matter of the letters themselves.”

“Pfft,” Claudia says. “I don’t even _care_ about the letters themselves.”

Steve says, “Claud, I think Myka and H.G. do.”

And Claudia does look a bit guilty at that. “Yeah. Sorry. I guess you better find out who tried to ruin your lives, huh?”

****

Once she gets home, Myka calls Tracy immediately. “Where are the letters?” she asks.

“What letters?” Tracy asks back.

“The ones I sent you. The ones _we_ sent you. From ages ago, during the war, after you came to visit, after Helena came back, _where are the letters_?”

“Calm down,” Tracy says. “They’re in that ugly box that Grandma gave me, up in my closet. I wanted to keep them. Because you two sound so sweet in them. So that’s where I put them.”

“Go look,” Myka says. “I bet they aren’t there.”

When Tracy comes back to the phone, she says, “How did you know that?”

“They’re gone?”

“The entire box is gone. Why would someone steal that box? It’s horrible.” Myka can hear, in the background, a voice that must be Kevin’s. “You _what_?” Tracy says to him, then comes back to Myka with, “He took it. The box. He took it.”

“ _Kevin_ did this?”

“Did what? You have to tell me what happened!”

“He sold our letters to _Confidential_ magazine!”

“He did no such thing!” Tracy protests, but she begins speaking away from the telephone receiver again. When she returns, she says, “He donated it to the rummage sale at church. Because I always said it was ugly and I hated it and it took up space in the closet. He didn’t even look inside it, Myka. I don’t know what to do! Can I buy them back for you? Can I tell them I made it all up? I don’t want to hurt you and Helena, and Kevin doesn’t either. I’ll fix it somehow, I promise I’ll fix it.”

Myka is almost hyperventilating with relief that her brother-in-law did not try to sell her out—she hadn’t believed for a second that Tracy would, but she really doesn’t know Kevin well at all, despite his having been married to Tracy for… almost two decades.

And she is also almost hyperventilating with relief that, now that the mystery of the letters is at least partially solved, she can begin to take some pleasure in the elegance of Claudia’s solution to the problem.

“It’s okay, Tracy,” she says. “It really is. You don’t have to fix it. I think Claudia, here at the studio, has it under control. I think it’s going to be all right.” She thinks about what she’s just said. “I really do think it’s going to be all right.”

****

Myka gets in her car and drives to Helena’s house. She almost feels like it’s dangerous to be driving at all: her heart is jumping along at twice its normal speed, and she honestly can’t tease out which of those doubletime beats are the aftermath of stark terror and which are excitement in the face of how their lives are about to change. Again.

She tells Helena what happened the minute she gets in the door. She doesn’t even put her purse down.

“A rummage sale,” Helena says. Myka can’t tell if she’s about to laugh or cry or scream, but something’s lurking behind her words. “Our lives were almost destroyed—and now may have been completely redeemed—by your brother-in-law donating an ugly box to a rummage sale?” Myka sees what’s lurking now: she’s about to laugh. And then she does, repeating, “A _rummage sale_?”

“Some things… just happen,” Myka says. _Things happen_ , her memory ghosts at her.

“I suppose they do,” Helena says. “Something else happened today as well, and the timing is oddly auspicious.”

“What?”

Helena looks a little embarrassed. “Well, I know it’s still a few days away, but I have a present for you. They delivered it early, though it was meant to be a surprise _on the day_ , and I was _extremely specific_ about which day it was to arrive—”

“I don’t think that’s actually important,” Myka says; in a minute she’ll be complaining about how no one can read a calendar and then move on to the way in which apparently no one can read anything at all, and heaven knows what will turn out to have been the cause of that. “Could you just tell me what it is?”

“No,” Helena says. “Well, I could, but I’d rather show you. Close your eyes.”

Myka does, and Helena leads her through the house; Myka can’t quite figure out where they’re going, but then they stop and Helena says, “All right. Open.”

They are standing in the library. The library, which now, again, after almost two decades, houses a chesterfield chair.

“Twenty years ago,” Helena says, very softly. “Sometimes I feel we should also celebrate the day I first saw you, but then I remember: you didn’t know right away.”

“I didn’t know _anything_ the day I first saw you,” Myka says.

“You knew not to look away.”

“How could I have looked away? It was _you_.”

They stand, side by side, and look at the chair.

Helena eventually says, tentatively, “Do you want to sit down?”

Myka smiles sideways at her. “In the chair?”

“No, on the floor. Of course in the chair!”

“Wait,” Myka says. “Before we do, I have a present for you too.” She has realized that her handbag is still looped over her arm, so why not? She pulls the long box out and hands it to Helena.

“I am pleased to note,” Helena says, “that you most likely could not fit the godforsaken desert of Sedona, Arizona into this box.”

Myka says, “If you don’t open it right now, I promise you I will fit _you_ into this box and _send_ you to Sedona, Arizona.”

“Fine,” says Helena. She opens the box, raises from it the delicate silver chain. Attached to the chain is a small, bejeweled pendant in the shape of a crown.

“Your crown, your heart,” Myka says. “I get them confused.”

“I should be giving this to you.” She’s crying.

“You bought a chair,” Myka reminds her. “You bought _this_ chair. I think you win.”

Helena coughs and sniffs. “Well, not to sound overly sentimental, but I think we both win. Today, I think everybody wins.”

“Except _Confidential_ magazine.”

“Except _Confidential_ magazine,” Helena agrees. She puts her arms around Myka and begins pulling her along. “And wouldn’t they just be scandalized to know what we’re about to do in that chair?”

Myka laughs and lets herself be led. “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Helena concedes. She drops into the chair and pulls Myka onto her lap, into a long, slow kiss.

“I think we might be too old for this,” Myka says when they part. But her voice is husky.

“I think you’re going to revise that opinion very soon.” Helena moves her hands behind Myka’s back and begins to unzip her dress. She leans up and breathes in Myka’s ear, “Now, for example.”

Myka gasps. “Revised,” she says. Her arms curve around Helena, and her hands travel exactly where she knows they should; Helena gasps too. “Never too old for this.”

****

Excerpts from _From Queens to Queers: Reading “Lesbian” Couples in Classical Hollywood Cinema_. Minneapolis: U of Minn P, 1994.

Chapter 4

Helena Wells and Myka Bering: Playing the Game, Changing the Rules

 _Queen of the Realm_ (1934, d. Arthur Nielsen) is a film that sits on the cusp between the end of Hollywood’s more permissive early-1930s period and the strict enforcement of the Production Code beginning in 1934: conceived during the former, yet made and released during the latter, it is a fascinating patchwork with clearly visible seams. Thus it is in a sense no surprise to find the association of Helena Wells and Myka Bering beginning here.

…Wells plays, of course, the titular queen, and Bering, in her film debut, appears in a small role as her maid. Despite speaking only a few lines, Bering is a constant presence in the film; she is usually somewhere in the frame whenever Wells is onscreen. This is not uncommon in Nielsen’s work, as he tends to prefer a crowded frame, but in this case, the two women seem physically drawn together in that frame, separated by less space than might be expected, particularly in a film of this period.

Their first scene, in fact, shows Bering-as-maid helping Wells-as-queen into an elaborate gown, all while the queen is carrying on a conversation with another character, a courtier. The audience is never shown the courtier; instead, we watch as Wells is made into a queen before our eyes, assembled by Bering…. Ultimately, while the film’s plot may center on political intrigue, its action is far more concentrated on the ways in which these two women exist physically together. Interestingly, this dynamic recurs over the course of their careers vis-à-vis each other.

Extratextually, some have suggested that their decade-long feud, as “chronicled” in _Photoplay_ and elsewhere, resulted from an attempt by Bering to upstage Wells during the filming of _Queen of the Realm_. One picture supposedly from the set of the film, published in _Photoplay_ in 1934, makes such a claim. It seems far more likely, however, that this purported animosity was simply for the purposes of publicity. Further, given the suggestions in later years about the nature of their offscreen relationship, it could be the case that the dispute was a publicity tactic possibly intended as cover for an early stage of that relationship….

They do not appear on film together again until 1942’s _On the Home Front_ (d. Jack Conway), which has justifiably become a text to which many point as evidence for that offscreen relationship. Granted, the general absence of men from the film is prompted by history, both in actuality (many male stars had already gone to war) and in terms of the storyline, which details the lives of several women who find it necessary to change their living situations in the absence of their husbands. Wells plays a woman who rents out her home’s spare bedrooms to other wives whose husbands are gone: one is played by Bering, and one by Hedy Lamarr. The scenes featuring all three women create a sense of camaraderie often found in movies of this period; they seem designed to both reflect and inspire a similarly plucky response in the viewing audience.

But when Bering and Wells are alone together, that sense shifts…. The climactic scene, which occurs right after Bering has been informed of her husband’s death in combat, conveys that same slightly uncanny sense of concentration on, almost an obsession with, their physical proximity. It is a continuous take: they begin the scene separated, at opposite edges of the frame, but as Bering tells Wells her news, they move closer and closer, until finally they embrace.

Taken out of context, this embrace is easily legible as romantic. (Several lesbian film and video artists have attempted to use clips from this scene in their work, but they have been threatened with copyright actions.)  Bering—and it is difficult to read her as her character here—falls into Wells’s arms. Wells holds her, strokes her hair, kisses her forehead. This occurs in a medium shot, not closeup, but the distance seems in some way to increase the intimacy of the scene: we are outsiders observing an intensely private moment.

Their turn as sisters in _Family Honor_ (d. Arthur Nielsen) the following year has a similar quality, though obviously their closeness here does seem more familial. It is almost, however, as if calling their bond sisterly gives them license to play up their connection without fear of its being misread. Bering in particular seems quite tender and nurturing throughout the film; this may be read as a response to Wells’s reported hospitalization for exhaustion. What “exhaustion” means in this context is difficult to say with any certainty, as the term has been used throughout Hollywood’s history as cover for everything from abortions to drug overdoses….

Almost stealthily, over the course of the next decade and a half, they become one of Hollywood’s most enduring movie “teams”: they appear in fourteen more films together, though in four of those they do not share screen time. Nevertheless, given their history, the viewer is almost always in some way _waiting_ for them to occupy the same scene. And when they do—perhaps it is simply in the films’ best interests to play up their familiarity with each other, to recall their earlier filmic interactions, but there is usually some element of script or staging that seems designed to ensure that some sort of sparks fly.

In 1955, for example, they play wives of rival ad salesmen; they have only one scene together, but it is extraordinary. They both show up at their husbands’ firm and, waiting in an office for the men to emerge from a meeting, begin to argue about ethics and sales tactics and whose husband deserves a promotion. Here, it is not the dialogue that is of particular note—though the ethical argument sounds quite different when voiced by women than it would voiced by men—but rather the way they advance physically on each other and retreat, then advance and advance, until finally they are face-to-face, in closeup. (Watching the scene with the sound off, undistracted by the argument itself, is a revelation.) They seem to lean toward each other, as if to suggest that if the scene were to extend just another second or two, who knows what might happen? It is 1955, of course, but the queer reading of their body language is readily accessible, and might have been even to viewers of the time.

The 1950s are an interesting time for Bering and Wells offscreen as well, as Bering and her husband, Peter Lattimer, whom she married right before he joined the Army at the start of World War II, divorce. The reason given is “mental cruelty,” but in the era preceding no-fault divorce, that is used as an umbrella term for just about anything. Lattimer remarries soon after the divorce, but Bering does not marry again. Wells never marries….

Their last appearance together on any screen occurs on _The Jean Arthur Show_ , a sitcom that ran on CBS in the fall of 1966. The show features Arthur as a lawyer in practice with her son, and Bering and Wells appear as former colleagues who help her with a case. There is some irony in the choice, or chance, of Arthur’s show serving as their swan song, given the discussion and rumors surrounding Arthur’s own sexuality….

The coda to their onscreen association is that both Bering and Wells spent their later years at the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the well-known Hollywood retirement community. No real conclusions can be drawn from this, of course; many actors and other employees of the classic Hollywood studios retired there. But it is notable, perhaps, that Bering moved to a cottage in the facility five years before she turned seventy, the usual minimum age of occupancy. One can only speculate as to why she would be allowed to do so, but also worth noting is the fact that Wells established residency at approximately the same time. In the end, there is something genuinely moving about the idea that these two stars, who were coupled so often on the screen, might have lived out their days the same way.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 18 tumblr tags: I am exhausted, but in the interest of saving the children, let's review our PSAs:, don't smoke, don't do cocaine, and don't drink to excess, I will now proceed to enjoy an adult beverage, but not to excess


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